Milwaukee's 19th Century Dime Museums

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In the late 19th century, Milwaukee’s horses produced 2,000 pounds of manure and 8,000 gallons of urine every day. Rain turned the streets into swamps, and on hot summer days the wind carried dried feces that choked pedestrians and dirtied buildings. But when the city’s residents needed an afternoon or evening of entertainment, a little filth wasn’t going to stop them. 

Before movies, radio, or even the automobile, 10 cents covered admission to an amusement hall known as the dime museum. The opulent Pabst and Academy of Music theaters catered to patrons who arrived in expensive carriages for an evening of opera or a Shakespeare drama. The dime museum featured lurid posters on the exterior that advertised freaks, vaudeville shows, curiosities and hoaxes within. The East Side swells in tails and top hats wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this. The long-gone museums offered the working-class population an opportunity to see people with phenomenal talents or unusual disabilities, two-headed animals, and hourly vaudeville shows. Often, the exhibits were hoaxes and amounted to little more than a cleverly staged carnival sideshow.

Milwaukee’s first museum opened in 1882 at Broadway and Wisconsin. Businessman Fred Englehardt leased the former Hempsted music store and renovated it into three large viewing rooms. During construction, Englehardt exhibited a giant whale outside for several weeks. Despite efforts to preserve the rotting corpse, the whale emitted a ghastly odor and was removed.On opening day, the museum exhibited the Transparent Human Head, ferocious Zulu warriors, a hammerhead shark and a mammoth alligator for 25 cents. Handbills also promised “hundreds of other curiosities” on display. Attendance reached capacity for the first few days as crowds came to see the transparent human head. The less than amazing attraction was a lamp placed behind the head of a 19-month-old child, displaying myriad veins and the silhouette of the brain. Englehardt’s operation went out of business a few months later. The outrageous 25-cent admission probably contributed to the demise.

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Head Without a Body

Eighteen months later, the Cosmopolitan Dime Museum at Wisconsin Avenue near Plankinton debuted with a Punch and Judy puppet show and a scale model of the Saginaw Valley Salt Works, “to show children how salt is made from lake and sea water." In the first week, 19,471 people came to see the Living Head Without a Body, savage Fiji cannibals, the Man-Fish, and a charming Circassian princess, the latter wearing very little clothing. The Sentinel noted that the young men were “captivated by her alluring looks.” The headless body was an illusion performed with mirrors and a special table. The Fiji cannibals, theatrically shackled to a pedestal, were later revealed to be husband and wife and very nice people. More interesting was the Man-Fish, an athletic person who could stay underwater for four minutes. Then there were the Custer Killers in person, starring Sitting Bull and six Sioux warriors. Again, the Sentinelchimed in, telling readers it was safe to walk up to Sitting Bull as “he is not on the warpath at present."In 1884, the museum was purchased for $10,000 by Jacob Litt, a flamboyant, ambitious showman who managed Schlitz Park at Seventh and Walnut. He advertised his venture as a family resort so safe that parents could feel comfortable leaving their children for a few hours.

Litt’s Mammoth Dime Museum, as it was now called, was in the hands of a marketing genius. He hired boys to hand out a weekly bulletin with current and upcoming attractions. On the sidewalk was a carnival barker who looked like W.C. Fields. His booming voice could be heard a half-block away as he bawled vaudeville showtimes, the performers, and their specialties. Future superstar illusionist Harry Houdini worked for Litt doing seven shows a day. When the barker took breaks, an oom-pah-pah brass quartet kept the energy level going until he returned.

Litt’s investment netted more than $17,000 in the first year. He presented the Turtle Boy, the “queerest, quaintest atom of humanity.” Audiences jammed the third-floor stage on the third to see the Bewitching Albino Sisters Whose Flowing White Hair Reaches Below Their Waists, Belle Moody—The Human Billiard Ball and the Murderers' Cabinet, a collection of devices supposedly used to commit various homicides. A permanent curio hall contained mechanical devices and various specimens of animal mutations preserved in glass laboratory jars. 

At 730 North Third Street, enterprising theater men invested in museums called the Palace, Columbia, Wonderland, Olympia, and Zoo. The names changed every few years as a new proprietor took over. Admission was still 10-cents to see the Four-Legged Man, Smoking Monkeys, Big-Headed Boy, Iron-Skulled Man, Legless Acrobat, Armless Landscape Painter, Swedish Giants, and the Madagascar Knife Walker. The bizarre headliners alternated with mind readers, magicians, dancers, elocutionists, gymnasts, and musicians. The attractions were as good as ever, but the public was tired of the gaudy museums, especially as Thomas Edison’s Vitascope films were booked at several theaters. Jacob Litt died of a stroke in 1905, and four years later, the Princess Theater opened on the very spot of all those failed Third Street museums.