Bradford Beach’s Centennial

Wisconsin's Legislature granted the lakefront land to the public 100 years ago.

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During a recent random encounter on Bradford Beach, a young schoolteacher said, “Everyone in Milwaukee has a Bradford Beach story.”

Milwaukee’s sandy lakefront now known as Bradford Beach was given to citizens by Wisconsin's Legislature 100 years ago. The filled-lakebed land was granted on June 2, 1921, solely “for public park and boulevard purposes.”  

This far-sighted creation of beachfront served two key purposes: protecting the bluffs above Lake Michigan from erosion and providing more public recreational space for a growing city. 

Today, people of all ages and backgrounds visit the beach from dawn to dusk in all weather. During COVID, it was an especially welcoming refuge and canvas for expression. 

As poet e.e cummings wrote, “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.”

The photographs in this chronicle were all taken by Virginia Small at Bradford Beach from March 2020 to June 2021.

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