A promotional poster for the original Milwaukee Day
This Thursday will mark the sixth annual Milwaukee Day. The holiday was born in 2010, stemming from a text message Brent Gohde got on April 14 (or 4/14) from a friend saying that the day should be “Milwaukee Day.” A logo and website led to some media attention and the day has now grown into a major event on the city’s spring calendar. “The growth has been fun,” Gohde told me via email. “We feel it's because Milwaukee isn't a town of transplants. We more or less have a shared history [that] everyone can tap into and have in common. That won't happen in many cities.” This year, the day will be celebrated all over the city by local businesses and at Turner Hall with a benefit show and party.
The chosen day is homage to the 414 area code. Using “414” as shorthand for the city, however, is a relatively new phenomenon. It was not until 1999 that the code became (nearly) exclusive to Milwaukee County. When area codes were first uniformly added to American telephone numbers, the 414 code covered all but the northwestern corner of the state. In 1955, the southwestern part of the state got its 608 code and, until the 414 numbers neared exhaustion in the late 1990s, the code covered the part of the state all the way up to Green Bay.
But if the concept of 414 meaning Milwaukee is new, the idea of a “Milwaukee Day” is not. The first Milwaukee Day was celebrated on December 2 – a kind of Depression-era Black Friday conceived by the local Association of Commerce to boost retail sales in the run-up to the Christmas season.
Schuster’s Department Store made sure to emphasize Milwaukee Day’s free streetcar rides in this 1932 advertisement artwork.
The first Milwaukee Day was held in 1931. Hundreds of local retailers participated in the day, offering special discounts and fitting out their display windows with elaborate, city-themed displays. Streetcars offered free trips to shopping districts and local hotels offered free use of their rooms during the day to out of town shoppers. Much like the modern-day holiday, a special focus was placed on locally-made items, with many stores offering their best deals on merchandise made in the city. To ensure that the day was not to be enjoyed only by visitors and the well-to-do, many factories gave their workers extended lunch hours or the day off to take advantage of the sales.
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The inaugural day was a smashing success, with an estimated 125,000 people visited local stores and spent an estimated $3 million. Downtown streets clogged with shoppers and the streetcar stops along the commercial district on North Third Street hummed with life. Some retailers reported sales three times higher than usual and one declared that city-wide sales were “double that of any previous December day” in local history. Another credited the sale with helping to ease city residents from the “money hoarding” mentality brought on by the Depression. “The stimulus runs back through the wholesalers and the factories,” he told the Sentinel.
The holiday returned in 1932 with even more pomp and prestige. Nearly every retailer in the city joined in as the day was officially opened at 7 a.m. with a unified blast of city factory whistles. Two hours later, another whistle blast indicated the beginning of free streetcar service as thousands of residents and visitors (delivered into the city by train fares reduced 75%) mobbed stores and shops. Near the noon hour, a parade featuring a marching band and a regiment of Spanish-American War veterans marched from the 27th and Wisconsin to the lakefront.
For the 1932 Milwaukee Day, many stores reported mobs of people waiting for their doors to open in the morning. However, the overall number of shoppers dipped from the year before and the estimated overall spending fell by a third. Sometime during 1933, the Association of Commerce decided to can Milwaukee Day, and the short-lived December 2nd holiday faded from local memory.
It’s shame that for 170 years as city, Milwaukee has only set aside eight of those 62,000+ days to celebrate itself. The original Milwaukee Day was a product of the financial insecurities of its time, an attempt to save jobs and promote what Milwaukee was capable of – to the region and to itself. The modern Milwaukee Day was launched with a far less serious motive, but retains the sense that this big, weird place we call home has something for everyone. “Milwaukee has a lot of flaws, obviously,” Gohde said. “But it also has a lot of hard-working, generous, talented, quirky individuals and institutions that we can take great pride in. [Milwaukee Day] is just a random good excuse to be positive and have some fun with such good people.”
