Photo credit: Lake Park Friends
Milwaukeeans have inherited a treasure trove of historic parks and other public landscapes rivaling in significance those in Chicago, Minneapolis and other major cities. Nonetheless, Milwaukee’s landscape heritage has not been fully chronicled—so it is less known and accessible than some other cities’. For example, a librarian at Milwaukee’s Central Library said recently that one of the most-requested references that does not exist is a comprehensive history of Milwaukee’s parks. That’s a missed opportunity for Milwaukee, since cities that showcase their many-layered histories also tend to exude present-day dynamism, rather than seeming like “Anywhere, USA.”
Some key facts offer clues about how Milwaukee County created a park system noted as a national model. One milestone occurred in 1889 when the city’s new park commission hired Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, to help select sites for a foundational “park system,” a concept Olmsted invented. Olmsted designed three of the initial seven: Lake, Riverside and Washington, as well as Newberry Boulevard linking the first two. Lake and Washington parks remain shining examples of Pastoral and Picturesque landscape styles.
Warren H. Manning, Olmsted’s planting designer, supervised construction of Milwaukee’s Olmsted-designed parks and continued consulting with park commissioners until 1907. Manning, dubbed America’s first “environmental planner,” designed Mitchell and Kosciusko parks as well as landscapes for Downer College and prominent Milwaukeeans.
Subsequent park development and city planning was spearheaded for 40 years by visionary and pragmatic Milwaukee Socialist Charles B. Whitnall. In 1907 he was appointed to both Milwaukee County’s new parks commission and the city’s Public Land Commission. In 1927 Alfred L. Boerner, a Cedarburg-born landscape architect, was hired to design county parks and supervise their construction. He and Whitnall built upon Olmsted’s ideas about parkways, park systems and naturalistic landscapes that also serve recreation. Boerner’s triumphs include Brown Deer and Whitnall parks, as well as Boerner Botanical Gardens. Much county park development was assisted by Depression-era work programs.
Another trailblazer who arguably influenced Milwaukee was Horace W.S. Cleveland, hired in 1870 by Milwaukee’s Public Works Department to design the city’s first planned park. Overlooking Lake Michigan, it was eventually named for Solomon Juneau, Milwaukee’s first mayor. Cleveland presciently planned for drainage and erosion control, as well as beauty. The Transcendentalist and conservationist had designed Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass., with Robert Morris Copeland in 1855. Cleveland briefly worked with Olmsted before moving to Chicago to practice landscape architecture in 1869; they remained lifelong friends.
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In 1873, Cleveland wrote a seminal book titled Landscape Architecture, as Applied to the Wants of the West; with an Essay on Forest Planting on the Great Plains. He encouraged designing cities around natural topography (rather than rigid grids), planting street trees and managing forestry—in an era of rampant clear-cutting. He wrote, “No such thing as a system of street [tree] planting under municipal regulation has, to my knowledge, been adopted by any city in the country.” His eventual crowning achievement was working to plan and design the Minneapolis and St. Paul park systems, including preserving the incomparable Mississippi River gorge as parkland.
Even earlier, pioneering Wisconsin scientist Increase A. Lapham intimately studied landscapes throughout the state. Lapham wrote the first book published in Milwaukee, A Geographical and Topographical Description of Wisconsin (1844). Renowned for helping to found the National Weather Service and chronicling Wisconsin’s flora, fauna, geology and Native American legacies, Lapham also laid out Forest Home Cemetery in 1850. He modeled it after Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, America’s first “rural cemetery,” which he had visited. He emphasized existing rolling terrain, trees and floral plantings to create a peaceful, parklike setting. Early settler Byron Kilbourn had recruited Lapham to work here in 1836, including laying out downtown streets west of the Milwaukee River.
More recently, Modernist ideas manifested in landscapes as well as buildings. One major legacy is a downtown oasis with a grove of chestnut trees, designed by Dan Kiley, an internationally renowned landscape architect. Surprisingly, when the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts recently announced plans to demolish Kiley’s plaza and replace it with lawn, his name was not mentioned. Kiley also designed the Cudahy Gardens to complement the Santiago Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Art Museum addition.
Landscape Art and Ideas
Landscape architecture frequently gets overlooked as an art form—despite being a direct way to experience a work of art again and again. Olmsted once wrote, “Landscape moves us in a manner more nearly analogous to music than anything else.” Although enjoying landscape art does not require specific knowledge, understanding a place’s design, history and other factors can enhance appreciation of it.
The National Park Service defines a “cultural landscape” as “a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity or person, or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values.” According to NPS, there are four general types of cultural landscapes, not mutually exclusive: historic sites, historic designed landscapes, historic vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes, which contain “a variety of natural and cultural resources that associated people define as heritage resources,” including religious sacred sites and massive geological structures.
Milwaukee’s public realm includes many diverse cultural landscapes. They reflect ideas such as that parks are the “lungs of a city” and that “the commons” and natural beauty should be available to all city dwellers. Honoring places makes history accessible.
Golden Opportunities
Charles Birnbaum, founder and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation based in Washington D.C., considers Milwaukee an ideal candidate for a collaborative effort to develop comprehensive documentation of historic landscapes for TCLF’s online searchable database. Birnbaum wrote in a recent email, “When initiating these efforts, the first step is to compile a list of sites and designers that we should focus on as we develop our research. We endeavor to work with local collegiate educators and their students, municipal agencies, nonprofit groups, local landscape architects and history/preservation professionals to inform that list.”
TCLF also hosts “What's Out There Weekends” with free interpretive tours led by expert guides. The weekends, held annually in different cities, “highlight the unique landscape legacy and local character of each city, defined by its publicly accessible parks, gardens, plazas, cemeteries, memorials and neighborhoods.” An extension of TCLF’s database, What’s Out There Weekends “draw people out into their communities to experience first-hand the landscapes that they see every day but often overlook.” Recently highlighted cities include Austin, Chicago, Indianapolis, Nashville and San Antonio.
“Olmsted 2022—The Legacy,” a nationwide celebration of the 200th anniversary of Frederick Law Olmsted’s birth, will be another chance for Milwaukee to shine. Milwaukee trails only Boston, Buffalo, Louisville and New York in number of parks designed by the “father of American parks.” Organizations throughout North America have begun planning to honor legacies of Olmsted and the successor firm headed by his sons.
Why History Matters
In “Why the Past Matters,” published in 2000 by the Wisconsin Magazine of History, William Cronon wrote, “What saves the past is the stories we tell about it. It is our stories that take dead objects and boring documents and make them live again.” Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the UW-Madison. His title itself honors a fellow esteemed historian from Portage, Wis. Cronon concludes “Let us seek to know the worlds we have lost, the people and creatures and institutions and landscapes and ideas that have made the world we now inhabit… In remembering, we remember ourselves.”
Cronon and other UW scholars have long led in studies relating to landscape history and land conservation. In Milwaukee, numerous scholars study and teach about urban landscapes, including Arijit Sen and Joseph Rodriguez at UW-Milwaukee, and Michael Carriere at Milwaukee School of Engineering. The City of Milwaukee’s Historic Preservation Commission offers guidelines for preserving historic assets, including landscapes.
Collectively honoring historically and culturally significant landscapes could help inform civic decision making. Without concerted attention, Milwaukee’s landscape heritage faces underappreciation, neglect or even random erasing and replacing.
