When speaking of Milwaukee historians and histories, it seems to always come down to one name… John Gurda. With the Making of Milwaukee book and documentary series, as well as a monthly Milwaukee Journal Sentinel column and numerous other television appearances, he has achieved a kind of local celebrity that is rare among local historians. I don’t mean to diminish his work, but I often respectfully disagree with the tendency to view local historiography in such a Gurda-centric view. There is such a deep well of work on Milwaukee ’s history that focusing on one author narrows our understanding of this great, big, weird place we call home. So, I’ve pulled a few of my favorite Milwaukee histories from the shelf, each of which offers another piece to the puzzle of this place. Some are a little hard to find, but each are absolutely worth the time.
Title page of The Milwaukee River, with am image of the troubled stream in the 1960s.
The Milwaukee River : An Inventory of Its Problems, An Appraisal of its Potential, Milwaukee River Technical Study Committee, 1968, City of Milwaukee .
As hard as it is to imagine today, it was not that long ago that the Milwaukee River was actually keeping people away from downtown and the Third Ward. Once a busy shipping channel, it was by the sixties a post-industrial relic, a stinking and soupy artery whose most regular passengers were not boaters, but a few hundred thousand dead and rotting alewives. The authors of this book tried to figure out just how to change that. Commissioned back when Mayor Henry Maier was making a major push at reviving downtown, the report is highly technical in places but conveys a fascinating time in city history that occurred when urban decay was a major issue and historic preservation was a fringe concept. The mood then was for replacing the old with the modern. The committee proposed – among other things – that acres of old Milwaukee (including the Pabst Theatre) be razed for parking garages, freeways, and a series of artificial lagoons. Of course, most of us would consider this a nightmare scenario today, but the report and the context it provides make it clear how sensible these plans seemed for their time. The study is only part-history but today acts as an incredible primary source for an era that is mostly forgotten.
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This is Milwaukee and The Milwaukee Journal, a pair of too-often overlooked works by Robert W. Wells.
This is Milwaukee, Robert W. Wells, 1970, Doubleday.
“ Milwaukee is a place that grows on you gradually,” Wells writes on the cover flap, “like a beer belly.” Openly admitting that he is not a historian and this is not a history of the city, Wells nonetheless manages to craft a narrative of the city’s past that is both funny and enlightening. One of the major failings of local history, I’ve felt, is the tendency of it to be so damn defensively boosteristic. Milwaukee , especially with its always-at-least-lingering insecurities over not being Chicago , is no exception. That isn’t to say that Wells spends much time here trashing Milwaukee , but he tells his stories as one would talk about family with family. The love is plain, but he doesn’t hesitate on the dirt. But, while it’s more fun and less uptight than Gurda, the book is far more Eurocentric. Wells’ failing here is the failing of almost all local history of this era: it was written by and for white people who, in many cases, didn’t even live in the city anymore. The bookflap on my copy says that Wells lives in Delafield.
The Milwaukee Journal: An Informal History of its First 100 years, Robert W. Wells, 1982, The Journal Company.
Of course, the idea of a corporation commissioning and publishing its own history throws up a few hundred red flags. However, the story told here is so essential to the understanding of Milwaukee ’s past that the work’s highly favorable view of its subject is forgivable. Written by longtime Journal columnist Wells, who is easily the best pure writer on this list, this book leans more towards the anecdotal than the academic, but the vivid portrait of the city it paints makes an essential part of any Milwaukee library. Wells brings his journalists’ wit and cynicism to the narrative and the book is nostalgic without feeling contrived. As daily newspapers were once the repository of a city’s moods, tendencies, and preoccupations, a history of the Journal acts almost as a history of Milwaukee itself.
Jones Island history and corner tavern architecture, works by William Ryan Drew and Ruth Kriehn.
Built in Milwaukee : An Architectural View of the City, William Ryan Drew, 1980, City of Milwaukee .
I was kind of stunned when reading this book to find that it was so in-depth and so easily wove architecture and the built environment into the city’s more straight-forward historical narrative. The most exhaustive survey of the built city yet made, the book was a part of a larger effort to encourage the preservation of historic buildings. And it goes far beyond the usual historic building suspects (City Hall, the Pabst Theatre, etc), examining parks, commercial and industrial buildings, and residential neighborhoods. The books also features a wealth of images, maps, and architectural drawings.
The Fisherfolk of Jones Island, Ruth Kriehn, 1988, Milwaukee County Historical Society
Engaging and thorough, this book offers a wonderful look at the long-lost fishing community of Jones Island – a piece of land currently occupied by the Port of Milwaukee and the sewage treatment plant. During its fishing village days, Jones Island was probably the strangest neighborhood Milwaukee has ever had, and Kriehn certainly conveys that here. She uses both the historical record and personal histories to create a narrative that is both fact-driven and somewhat gossipy. She treats the place with affection but does not ignore the warts. This is what a neighborhood history should be, and given that the neighborhood no longer exists, it has a sense of timelessness. No need for the obligatory, “the people of XYZ place continue to thrive today…” It’s as much a eulogy as a history.
Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City ’s First Century, Matthew J. Prigge, 2015, Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
Ok, I really want to apologize for this. I’m shameless and awful. To be clear, I did not dream up this post just to plug my book. Rather, both the book and this blog post were born of the same desire to shake the secrets out of this city. Certainly, not all local history is positive. None of the city’s modern vices are anything new. Nor is the violence and poverty here today anything that would have looked out of place in 1850 or 1890 or 1930. The story of any city is inevitably a story of change, but human nature changes a lot less than we’d like to think. I try to get to that point in this book. And I’ll include it here for that reason: that it tries to do something that hasn’t really been tried before in local scholarship. The author is a real self-centered ass, however… just the worst. Anyway, you can buy it here. And it has a website, a Facebook page, and a local launch event.
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What are some of your choice histories of Milwaukee ? Disagree with this list? Fight it out in the comments section below. Feel free to use personal insults against me to try to prove your point!
Check out Matthew J. Prigge’s weekly radio segment on WMSE 91.7 FM every weekday around 7:40 am and 5:40 pm.
