Photo Courtesy Ron Cogswell, Flickr CC
From a post-industrial wasteland to one of Milwaukee’s most fashionable neighborhoods, the Historic Third Ward has experienced a turn-around like no other area in the city over the past several decades. 2016 marks the 40th anniversary of the Historic Third Ward Association (HTWA), the organization that has piloted the area through an often-turbulent period for urban America and allowed it to develop as one of Milwaukee’s premier places to live, work and socialize.
Just south of Downtown and bounded by the Milwaukee River to the west and south and Lake Michigan to the east, the original Third Ward—so known for once being the city’s third voting ward—developed as a prime spot for wholesale traders and shippers in the 1850s. While the western half of the ward became home to warehouses and light manufacturing firms, the eastern half grew as the city’s first Irish neighborhood. In 1892, the largest fire in Milwaukee history leveled more than 400 buildings in the ward and left nearly 2,000 of the area’s Irish residents homeless.
As tragic as it was, the fire cleared the way for a massive rebuilding of the ward’s west half—a flurry of construction that produced an incredible time capsule of turn-of-the-century industrial architecture. But the city was slow to recognize the treasures that the ward contained. The post-war years saw a boom in truck and semi shipping that drew businesses away from the water and rail-adjacent Third Ward and into the suburbs. In the late 1950s, Milwaukee’s first urban renewal project decimated the ward’s residential section, by then known as Milwaukee’s Little Italy, slashing its population by nearly 90% and further alienating the area from the city at large.
It was from the Third Ward’s low point that the HTWA emerged. In 1976, as the city was working to revitalize the commercial and movie theater district along West Wisconsin Avenue, Alderman Kevin O’Connor proposed that the street’s least-desirable businesses—namely the go-go bars, adult book stores, peep shows and smut theaters—be corralled into a single area via restrictive rezoning measures. Other major cities, most notably Boston with its “Combat Zone,” had made similar efforts to contain adult-themed businesses into a segregated district of sex and sin. O’Connor’s proposed location for Milwaukee’s Combat Zone was the sparsely populated and largely forgotten Third Ward.
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But not everyone was so quick to give up on the area. Isabelle Polacheck, president of the ward’s Reliable Knitting Works, knew her neighborhood had more to offer than dark corners for the city to hide its porno shops. “Izzy gathered together her neighbors, in absolutely the best activist way,” Alderman O’Connor said fondly of the drive to squash his proposal. “There was no hysteria. She simply revealed the dynamic activity behind the brick facades and showed this was not an abandoned area.”
“We were nobodies, small businessmen without clout,” Polacheck recalled in 1985. “It was a really good feeling that we could do something, that people cared about the community and about keeping some dignity in the community.” Polacheck, with other ward business owners and residents, officially formed the HTWA in 1976 and quickly brought an end to the talk of a zoned red light district in the area.
Protecting the Third Ward, however, was not the same as developing it, and for a half-decade after the defeat of the Combat Zone idea, the Association and the neighborhood stagnated. Meanwhile, the area had become something of a magnet for artists, with low rents and ample studio space. In 1982, a revived HTWA, recognizing the architectural significance of the buildings that had gone up in the wake of the 1892 fire, began to advocate for recognition of the industrial half of the old ward as a federally protected historic district. In 1984 the designation was granted and shortly thereafter, the city rezoned the area to allow for mixed-used redevelopment of ward buildings.
While developers and preservationists often clashed in other parts of the city, their goals were one and the same in the Third Ward. “The future is in the past in this dingy but intriguing district,” the Milwaukee Sentinel observed in 1984. Yet, the idea of what the Third Ward could become—many spoke of it as Milwaukee’s answer to Manhattan’s SoHo—remained at odds with the reality of the neighborhood for most of the next decade.
Progress was made—the Buffalo Building, 300 E. Buffalo, added 12 residential units in 1984 and the Broadway Apartments, 234 N. Broadway, opened in 1987 with 105 units—but the area remained a bit too raw for many Milwaukeeans. The vision for the new Third Ward made for an interesting contrast with the Third Ward that once was. In 1986, the Milwaukee Journal reported on strange mingling in the neighborhood—the chic art students making sketches and the burly men working hauling fruits and vegetables on Commission Row, the trendy condo owners and the homeless men who slept at the Salvation Army rehab center, and the antique shops and the dirty bookstores.
A series of major projects in the 1990s, however, eased the way for the development to follow. The first was the $3.4 million streetscapes project, which added 285 specially designed light poles and various neighborhood and street signage and converted Broadway from a little-used one-way street into a hybrid pedestrian/automobile boulevard. In 1994, the long-standing issue of inadequate parking was addressed with the completion of the neighborhood’s first parking structure. And in 1997, the HTWA launched a feasibility study of what would eventually become the Milwaukee Public Market.
When Nancy O’Keefe, executive director of the HTWA, joined the organization in 1996, the area was primed for growth, but still lingered as something of a well-kept secret in the city. “When I started we had about 120 units of housing and about 30 retailers,” O’Keefe says. She recalls that the ward’s most popular restaurant was a little greasy spoon diner called the Broadway Bar and Grill (223 N. Broadway) where the men of Commission Row ate breakfast and lunch.
Michael Gardner, president of the HTWA, recalls that the Broadway Bar and Grill rarely even stayed open for dinner—nor did many places in the ward. “When we first started, you had an area that was really nothing more than warehousing and manufacturing, which meant that after 5 p.m., there was, like, nobody down here.”
The late 1990s housing boom truly brought about a revolution in the ward. Between 2000 and 2006, the Third Ward added more than 800 housing units, nearly all in renovated industrial structures. Dozens of businesses—including many bars and restaurants that stayed open well past 5 p.m.—opened in remade street-level storefronts. During the same period, the Public Market, which O’Keefe considers the HTWA’s greatest single success, and the ward’s portion of the Riverwalk were competed, creating two of the neighborhood’s biggest gathering points.
Extensive efforts by the city through the 1980s and ’90s to clean up the Milwaukee River introduced the recreational value of the waterway to the ward, and riverfront property—at one time a burden to developers—became some of the area’s most desirable land. By the 2000s, the Third Ward was the fastest-growing residential area in southeastern Wisconsin.
Both O’Keefe and Gardner insist that the growth of Third Ward was bigger than the efforts of their organization or the fortuitous timing of the real estate boom. “There’s an ambiance to the neighborhood,” says O’Keefe. “It’s a very walkable neighborhood … one of the safest, probably, near Downtown. People watch out for each other. The people in the condos, they’re all friends.” Gardner credits the building stock—more than 70 historic structures in 10 square blocks dating from between 1892 and 1928—with creating an experience like none other in the city. “Each building is unique in its own item.”
The latest milestone in the HTWA’s four decades is the building of the Kimpton Journeyman Hotel (310 E. Chicago St.), fulfilling the long-standing desire of the Association for a hostelry in the ward. “We’ve never had a hotel and I’m so excited about this,” O’Keefe says. The 158-room hotel will open in July.
In 1980, only 74 people lived in the Third Ward and a smattering of businesses employed an ever-dwindling number of workers. Today, the area is home to 550 businesses that employ more than 6,000 people and another 3,000 call the Third Ward home. The area has grown so much that the HTWA is now looking outside of the historic district’s bounds. “The problem is that the only real estate really left is east of Milwaukee Street,” Gardner says, looking ahead to the association’s goals for the future. “And that will be very interesting, to see those developments start up as soon as the gateway project is completed.”
But for now, O’Keefe and Gardner are content to keep up with the progress that has already been made and to keep fulfilling the needs of one of the city’s most dynamic neighborhoods. “It sure looks a lot different today,” O’Keefe says of the neighborhood she first got to know 20 years ago. “It’s crazy. It’s great.”
Third Ward Landmarks
Buffalo Building
300 E. Buffalo St.
Built in 1900 and featuring distinctive arched windows and terra cotta trimmings, the Buffalo Building previously housed the Cohen Brothers Clothing Company and the Midwest Lamp & Novelty Company. In 1983, it became the first industrial building renovated for residential use.
Marshall Building
207 E. Buffalo St.
Built in 1906 with a pioneering structural engineering method using flat, concrete slab floor and steel rebar-reinforced support columns, the building was originally home to the Hoffman & Sons wholesale grocers. It was renamed the Marshall Building in 1948 and was gradually repurposed as office space and a home for Third Ward artists and craftspeople to work and sell their creations. It continues to be one of the ward’s leading creative spaces, housing more than two-dozen galleries and artist studios as well as the offices of the Shepherd Express and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Marine Terminal Building
120 N. Broadway.
A wide variety of businesses operated in this space, which opened in 1917 when package shipping was still common on the Great Lakes. The building was still being used for industrial purposes in 2003, when it was purchased by the Mandel Group and converted into riverfront condominiums.
#15 Fire House
105 N. Water St.
Built in 1915 as Milwaukee’s #15 Firehouse, this was the only city firehouse to exclusively service fireboats. It was the longtime home to the fireboat Deluge until the vessel and the station were retired in 1984. It remained empty until it was sold by the city in 1997. It is presently used for residential purposes.
Jewett & Sherman Merchants’ Mills Building
343 N. Broadway
One of the few building in the ward to survive the 1892 fire, this is one of the oldest structures in the neighborhood. Built in 1875, the building was designed by E. Townsend Mix, who designed several local landmarks including Michigan Street’s Mitchell and Chamber of Commerce buildings. Once home to a prominent coffee and spice firm, the building is presently home to the Wicked Hop and the St. Paul Avenue Colectivo.
