♪ >> In the Mass Avenue District in downtown Indianapolis, sits an ornate and strikingly well-preserved 19th century building, the Athenaeum.

Today, this building is home to more than a dozen businesses and organizations.

It's a vibrant multiuse place where folks can enjoy a drink, see a show, and even break a sweat.

And it's pretty much been that way from the beginning.

The Athenaeum was erected by a group of German immigrants called the Turners with a couple of goals in mind.

>> These Turners, it was a movement that came out of Germany post-Civil War and they had a motto: A sound mind and a sound body.

So as they immigrated here to The States, Midwest, they built these temples, if you will, of a sound mind and a sound body.

The idea was that, you know, on any given day, you could service both your body and your mind in the same space.

>> Originally called Das Deutsche Haus, it was changed to the Athenaeum in reaction to anti-German sentiment during the first World War.

>> The name Athenaeum refers to the Greek Goddess Athena.

The name by etymology is a house of higher learning.

>> And to be a member, you didn't just pay a fee.

You became part owner.

>> You actually bought stock certificates to be members.

So you actually owned portions of the space or of the building.

Like, anybody could be part of the club.

It wasn't exclusive.

So you had, like, a melting pot of all of these different cultures coming into this space.

>> It served as a vital cultural hub for many German immigrants in the city.

>> So it was a very large organization at its beginning, and stayed rather large for quite a few years.

It wasn't until kind of second generation families really started to either move on to different areas of the state or the country, or as families, you know, aged out.

This building actually almost didn't make it.

The roof was leaking.

There wasn't a sprinkler system for fire safety.

There wasn't an elevator.

All of these things led to intervention from the Lilly Endowment to come in and save the building in the late '80s.

♪ >> That investment did more than just save the building.

It brought it back into the fold of life in the city, while still holding true to its original mission.

♪ >> It's a vibrant space, alive and many different kind of designs and intentions.

Even today, we still live by the motto of a sound mind and a sound body.

And we approach it a little bit differently, but, you know, we are able to pay homage to the original intent of the building and keep that moving forward.

We still have an active gym.

The YMCA has a gym in the space.

So we are one of the YMCA branches in the city.

We have a very active coffee shop, Coat Check Coffee, which was built out here in the space.

A Rathskeller Restaurant.

If you've been to Indianapolis, if you had a pint of beer or a liter of beer in this town, you've been to the Rathskeller, both the internal restaurant for their German cuisine, also outside in the beer garden, which has one of the most beautiful, breathtaking views of the city skyline.

We have a 400-seat cabaret theater on the top floor of the building that is home to many different production organizations, as well as ourselves, as we put on different shows throughout the year.

>> And even though the Athenaeum has had its share of updates over the years, echoes of its past still linger in every corner.

>> When you walk down to the substructure into the Rathskeller, it's literally like you are walking back into the early 1900s.

It's wild.

A lot of the original decorations.

Most of the tables and chairs are still original.

I mean, imagine, those things are like 125 years old.

♪ The theater itself is practically untouched from when it opened in 1898.

The same art reliefs in the plaster.

The proscenium is the same, the stained glass, which is absolutely stunning.

All of the bits and pieces of that space are the same.

Even in the YMCA, the gym has some of the original equipment from when they were doing gymnastics, like practice ladders.

It still has all of the original hooks and eyelets from when they had rings in the building.

And there's this beautiful bridging of the generations or the centuries of what the building used to look like and what it is now, and how they're married together.

It's absolutely amazing.

>> It's a place that marries the present to the past.

Celebrating old traditions while creating space for new ones.

♪ >> We do an Oktoberfest adjacent event.

We call it GermanFest.

It's in celebration of German-American Day, which is always on October 5th.

We do a lot of the same kind of celebrations, beer, food.

We do wiener dog races.

We do stein holding.

We do sausage eating.

We've got great German folk music, but then we also shine a light on German immigrants that came to central Indiana and the impact they have on the Hoosier state.

>> Tiki taki tiki taki oi oi oi!

>> It's a big event for us.

It's our largest fundraiser that we do every year.

Although, nipping at its heels during the holiday season, we now do a Christkindlmarkt for four weekends out of the year, where we convert the Rathskeller beer garden into basically the Swiss Alps.

It's like you are walking into a different country.

We've got 14 different huts.

We've got food and beverage and retail.

All local, but done in a Germany flair.

>> From beer gardens to live music, there's always something happening.

♪ >> And that's the beauty of the design of this building, right?

It was meant to be somewhere you could stay from morning to night.

I mean, you could come work out.

You can have breakfast.

You can have lunch, dinner.

You can go to an event, you can see a show.

So whether it's, you know, meeting some friends after work and having a pint of beer in the beer garden, it's meeting family members that are coming in out of town and having dinner in the Rathskeller.

Seeing the next, you know, big show during the holiday season, whether it's the Nutcracker, or what have you, in the theater or as a local resident just coming and working out.

It's approachable to everybody, which is the beauty and what it was designed to be in a sound mind and a sound body kind of scenario.