A History Lover's Guide to Milwaukee

By James Nelsen

Milwaukee is often described as a "big small town," and its quirky character stems from its many neighborhoods--each with its own stories to tell. Early territorial disputes, for example, led to the horribly (or humorously) misaligned streets of downtown. The city's signature rectangular pizza was born in the Third Ward. In Kilbourntown, Teddy Roosevelt was saved from an assassin's bullet by the smallest of items. Not far from that spot, eight baseball team owners formed the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs. And no matter the neighborhood, a fantastic glass of suds is never far away in this renowned beer city. Leading readers on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood tour, author and Milwaukee native Jim Nelsen pinpoints the fascinating historic locations of the Cream City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781439673850

James Nelsen

Jim Nelsen is a lifelong Milwaukee resident. He enjoys studying the history of his city, playing with his cat and dogs and following his beloved Milwaukee Brewers.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

What do you think of when you think of Milwaukee? Milwaukee may mean different things to different people. A lot depends on your age, income level and ethnic background. A lot also depends on how long you have lived here. For people who have been here a long time, when thinking about Milwaukee’s identity, they may think of the community’s many ethnicities and ethnic festivals. To them, Milwaukee feels like a big small town. It is a place where you seem to run into someone you know no matter where you go. To outsiders, Milwaukee may be best known as a blue-collar industrial city. Other people may define Milwaukee by the three Bs—beer, brats and bowling. For people of a certain age, the city was the setting of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. In recent years, civic and business leaders have tried to shed Milwaukee’s industrial image. They have tried to remake Milwaukee into a city for young, educated people—a city of technology and a vibrant social life.

Some people have described Milwaukee as a city of neighborhoods. While the neighborhoods might not be as pronounced as those of larger cities like New York or Chicago, residents will, at a minimum, refer to what side of town they live on. The north side and south side are the major divisions. The east side and northwest sides also have their own identities. Sometimes people refer to the west side or southwest side of the city too. Some neighborhoods, such as Bay View and Riverwest, have very strong identities. Other neighborhood names are mere convenient designations.

This book is organized by neighborhoods for an easier time navigating the city. Each chapter divides into historical background and sightseeing sections. chapter 1 is a broad overview of Milwaukee history. Chapters 2 through 5 provide detailed walking tours of Milwaukee’s four original neighborhoods. Chapters 6 through 11 focus on areas of the city that developed later; users must rely on an automobile or mass transit to visit these places. Finally, chapter 12 is about the history of brewing.

In many cases, it is hard to say what a neighborhood actually is in Milwaukee. There are not always firm lines or agreed-upon names. In 1995, the City of Milwaukee’s Neighborhood Identification Project set boundaries and names for seventy-five areas of the city. Therefore, technically, no one is ever not in a neighborhood. However, some of these boundaries ignore historical traditions, and others ignore contemporary perceptions. For example, people who live near Brady Street often identify Brady Street as their neighborhood, even though they technically live on the Lower East Side. Fernwood is another example. It is sometimes described as a neighborhood inside the Bay View neighborhood, which makes no sense. It is either its own neighborhood or it is an enclave within Bay View. Other neighborhoods exist only in name. For example, as a child, I grew up in the Lyon’s Park neighborhood, but I never knew we had a name. I also did not know that my friend across the street lived in Hawley Farms. Everyone there just said we lived on the south side or southwest side of the city. Such boundary disputes are documented when possible to help the reader better understand the geography of the city.

Chapter 1

THE HISTORY OF MILWAUKEE

The history of Milwaukee is a fascinating story. It begins with prehistoric Native Americans and follows migratory patterns of Europeans and other ethnic groups. Milwaukee’s story is about of the rise of industry and national prominence, and it is about hard times and struggle. Most recently, its story has become one of renewal and changing identity.

Twelve thousand years ago, Paleoindians entered southern Wisconsin. They left behind artifacts and more than two hundred effigy mounds. In fact, southern Wisconsin had more mounds than any other part of the United States. White farmers destroyed most of the mounds in the nineteenth century, although two small mounds survive at Lake Park and State Fair Park. The Paleoindians vanished between nine thousand and ten thousand years ago.

By the late seventeenth century, several Native American groups were living in the area. They included the Potawatomi, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Ottawa, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Meskwaki (Fox) and Sauk tribes. The newcomers named the area Milwaukee. There are many translations of Milwaukee, but most refer to fertility. The good land is the most common. Others include gathering place by the river, wet land and the name of a medicinal plant. However, Milwaukee can also mean stinking river, which is probably a reference to the smell of dead alewives.

Milwaukee’s fertility comes from the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic Rivers, which meet in Milwaukee. The rivers created wetlands downtown and in the Menominee Valley that were perfect for growing rice. Fish and ducks also lived in the wetlands. Outside of downtown, Native Americans grew corn, beans, squash and tobacco. Nearby forests were another source of food, as they were full of black bear, deer, elk and beaver.

Statue of Solomon Juneau. Stephanie Mager.

The French were the first whites to visit Milwaukee. In 1674, Father Jacques Marquette, a missionary, landed in Milwaukee and met Native Americans. By 1712, the French had claimed all of North America from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains, south of Hudson Bay. Jean Baptiste Mirandeau and Jacques Vieau were the first whites to settle in Milwaukee. They built a trading post in what is now Mitchell Park (see chapter 11). Mirandeau died in 1820 or 1821. He was the first white person to be buried at a Milwaukee cemetery. The cemetery was downtown, at what would become the intersection of Broadway and Wisconsin Avenue. Vieau married Angelique Roy. She was Métis (both Native American and white) and the granddaughter of a Potawatomi leader. She had extended family all over Wisconsin, which helped with her husband’s business. They had twelve or thirteen children. One of the children, Josette, married Solomon Juneau, her father’s clerk (see chapter 2). Vieau contracted and survived smallpox in 1831–32. Another outbreak occurred in 1833–34 that killed many Native Americans, leaving no one to harvest furs for Vieau and the other traders in the area. Vieau stuck around until 1836, when he retired to a farm in Green Bay. He died there in 1852 at age ninety-five.

Milwaukee became English territory in 1763, after the French lost the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years’ War). Culturally, however, Milwaukee remained a French and native community until the 1830s. The Erie Canal opened in 1825, and white settlers of other ethnicities were flooding into Wisconsin by the 1830s. Solomon Juneau sold them plots of land on the east side of the Milwaukee River. Residents nicknamed the settlement Juneautown. Traders liked Milwaukee’s bay. It was larger than that of any other nearby city. Between the bay and the river, Milwaukee could float the largest ships on the Great Lakes. By the 1830s, Juneautown had more than one thousand settlers. The U.S. government soon forced Native Americans to move west.

In 1834, Byron Kilbourn arrived to conduct a land survey. He saw Milwaukee’s potential and wanted to start selling land on the west bank of the Milwaukee River. People nicknamed his new community Kilbourntown. Also in 1834, Colonel George Walker settled at the confluence of the Menominee and Milwaukee Rivers, near Lake Michigan. This area is still known as Walker’s Point.

Maintaining separate governments was expensive, so Juneautown and Kilbourntown merged into a single village in 1839. Walker’s Point joined in 1845. The merger did not end the rivalry. Laws differed from community to community. Roads did not line up, which made bridge construction difficult. Eventually, the new village built some bridges on angles. A small-scale civil war actually developed in 1845 due to disagreements about the bridges (see chapter 3). Eventually, residents set their differences aside and wrote a city charter. The territorial legislature approved it on January 31, 1846, two years before Wisconsin became a state. Solomon Juneau became Milwaukee’s first mayor in 1846.

North Avenue was the city’s northern border, and Greenfield Avenue was the southern border. Twenty-Seventh Street was the western border, although the border dropped to Sixth Street between North Avenue and Walnut Street. Lake Michigan, of course, was the eastern border. Milwaukee County also had seven towns that lay beyond the city. Twenty-Seventh Street divided the western towns from the eastern towns. To the west, Granville was north of Hampton Avenue. The Town of Wauwatosa ran from Hampton Avenue to Greenfield Avenue. Next, the Town of Greenfield was between Greenfield and College Avenues. Franklin was south of College Avenue. In the east, the Town of Milwaukee was north of the city. The Town of Lake was south of the city to College Avenue. Finally, Oak Creek was south of College Avenue.

Early city services were primitive. There was no sanitation system—people threw garbage into their yards for hogs to eat, and Milwaukee did not have a sewer until 1850. It ran only down Wisconsin Avenue. Human and animal waste stayed in the streets and got into the drinking water. Not coincidently, Milwaukee’s first cholera outbreak occurred between 1849 and 1850. Dozens of people died each week. The city hired men to haul away some of the waste. The Common Council considered removing all of it to be too expensive.

Schools were not very good either. There were only five public schools in 1846, and they were all in rented buildings with one teacher each. Some schools had more than one hundred students.

Classes were big because so many immigrants arrived. Most were German, who settled in Kilbourntown. Others were Irish. They settled in the Third Ward, which was the southern portion of Juneautown. The old Yankee/Yorker elite continued living in northern Juneautown, also known as the First Ward. Other smaller groups of European immigrants came from about a dozen different countries. By 1850, there were also almost one hundred African Americans in Milwaukee too.

Milwaukeeans held a variety of jobs in the city’s early days. Farming was the main occupation. By 1860, wheat was the biggest crop in the state. In fact, Wisconsin produced more wheat than any other state but Illinois. Milwaukee, having a large harbor, shipped wheat all over the world. Of course, Milwaukee made its name on brewing beer. Pabst, Blatz, Miller and Schlitz were the most famous, but there were several other smaller breweries too. Service industry jobs were in hotels, taverns and general stores.

The Civil War greatly accelerated the city’s economic growth. The war closed the Mississippi River to commercial ships. Therefore, Milwaukee’s port on Lake Michigan became very important. Milwaukee shipped 40,000 pounds of freight in 1860 but almost 250,000 pounds in 1865. Railroads boomed as well. Milwaukee slaughtered twice as many hogs during the war to provide meat to soldiers. Tanneries used the hides for leather boots, belts and harnesses. The number of tanneries in the city jumped from thirteen to thirty between 1860 and 1870.

Shipping continued to increase after the Civil War. Ships crowded the Milwaukee River from one end to the next. Milwaukee shipped between 500,000 and 1.3 million barrels of wheat annually from 1868 to 1882. In 1884, Milwaukee milled more flour than any city in the United States except Minneapolis and St. Louis. In 1885, it brewed 1,117,256 barrels of beer. In 1886, it tanned more than 500,000 hides into leather.

John Plankinton and Alexander Mitchell became two of the wealthiest men in the city. Plankinton was Milwaukee’s leading meatpacker. He worked with John Layton and Patrick Cudahy. Mitchell was Milwaukee’s railroad king. His wife, Martha, cofounded the Soldiers Home, which is now part of the Veterans Administration hospital complex on National Avenue.

Of course, most people were poor. They worked ten or more hours per day in factories for very little pay. Sunday was the only day off, and for some people, it was only a half day. Jobs were unsafe. Tannery workers used dangerous chemicals. People who worked in flourmills coughed up grain dust for hours at home. Brewery workers did a lot of heavy lifting. Meatpacking was bloody, and workers often slipped and fell. Some cut themselves or lost fingers. Ironworkers labored in temperatures of more than 160 degrees.

Workers organized unions to try to improve pay and working conditions. Some unions were strictly local, but Milwaukee also had a branch of the Knights of Labor. In 1886, the Knights demanded an eight-hour day. They used rallies, parades and strikes to get what they wanted. Employers responded with lockouts and strikebreakers. Wisconsin governor Jeremiah Rusk even sent in militia to break up one strike at a large iron mill in Bay View (see chapter 6).

Undeterred, unions continued to organize. They also helped elect socialists to office. In fact, Milwaukee is the only major American city to ever elect three socialist mayors. They were Emil Seidel (1910–12), Daniel Hoan (1916–40) and Frank Zeidler (1948–60). Milwaukeeans also elected socialist Victor Berger to Congress in 1910, 1922, 1924 and 1926.

The socialists were efficiency experts. They found ways to cut spending while expanding services. They annexed land from rural towns and laid miles of water and sewer pipes to them. They disposed of garbage. They also encouraged vaccination and other public health reforms. Socialist Charles Whitnall designed the park system. Milwaukee County had more parkland per person than any other urban area in the United States. Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York, designed Lake, Riverside and Washington Parks in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee’s population continued to increase after 1900. By 1902, it had more people per square mile than any other city in the United States except Boston and Baltimore. By 1910, there were 373,857 people in the city. According to the 1890 census, 86 percent of its residents were foreign born, making Milwaukee the most European city in the United States. Older, established families moved to outlying areas of the city or to nearby suburbs. Newer immigrants filled in existing areas. German Lutherans continued to live on the north side, and Poles dominated the south side. In 1901, the Poles finished building St. Josaphat’s church. It became the largest church in Milwaukee. Due to its size and beauty, the pope declared it a basilica. By 1910, there were also Italian, Greek, Serbian and Jewish communities in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee played key roles in national and global events after 1910. Wisconsin was a progressive state in the 1910s. When Teddy Roosevelt founded the Progressive Party and ran as its candidate for president in 1912, he campaigned in Milwaukee, where a would-be assassin shot him (see chapter 2).

On the world stage, Milwaukee actively participated in World War I. Billy Mitchell, a grandson of Alexander Mitchell, founded the earliest version of the U.S. Air Force. He also led several daring missions during the war. On the civilian side, Milwaukeeans bought $145 million of war bonds and planted victory gardens.

There were attempts to purge Milwaukee of its German heritage during the war. German plays and concerts stopped. People no longer spoke the language in public, and almost all schools stopped teaching it. Some people Americanized their