Milwaukee

With the migration of African American sharecroppers to northern cities in the first half of the 20th century, the African American population of Milwaukee grew from fewer than 1,000 in 1900 to nearly 22,000 by 1950. Most settled around a 12-block area along Walnut Street that came to be known as Milwaukee's Bronzeville, a thriving residential, business, and entertainment community. Barbershops, restaurants, drugstores, and funeral homes were started with a little money saved from overtime pay at factory jobs or extra domestic work taken on by the women. Exotic nightclubs, taverns, and restaurants attracted a racially mixed clientele, and daytime social clubs sponsored "matinees" that were dress-up events featuring local bands catering to neighborhood residents. Bronzeville is remembered by African American elders as a good place to grow up--times were hard, but the community was tight.

Initially dominated by simple renditions of East Coast architecture, Milwaukee developed from three pioneer settlements, those of Solomon Juneau, Byron Kilbourn, and George Walker--three hubs from which three villages radiated outward into one city. Following the Civil War, Milwaukee's growth at the onset of the Industrial Era afforded the city a fanciful array of Victorian streetscapes. The 1890s followed with an era of ethnic architecture in which bold interpretations of German Renaissance Revival and Baroque designs paid homage to Milwaukee's overwhelming German population. At the turn of the century, Milwaukee's proximity to Chicago influenced the streetscape with classicized civic structures and skyscrapers designed by Chicago architects. World War I and the ensuing anti-German sentiment, as well as Prohibition, inevitably had adverse effects on "Brew City." By the 1920s, Milwaukee's architecture had assimilated to the national aesthetic, suburban development was on the rise, and architectural growth would soon be stunted by the Great Depression.

Other historians have tended to treat black urban life mainly in relation to the ghetto experience, but in Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. offers a new perspective that complements yet also goes well beyond that approach. The blacks in Black Milwaukee were not only ghetto dwellers; they were also industrial workers. The process by which they achieved this status is the subject of Trotter's ground-breaking study. This second edition features a new preface and acknowledgments, an essay on African American urban history since 1985, a prologue on the antebellum and Civil War roots of Milwaukee's black community, and an epilogue on the post-World War II years and the impact of deindustrialization, all by the author. Brief essays by four of Trotter's colleagues--William P. Jones, Earl Lewis, Alison Isenberg, and Kimberly L. Phillips--assess the impact of the original Black Milwaukee on the study of African American urban history over the past twenty years.

In the late 1800s, the area was developed by immigrant Poles, who became the dominant population for over 100 years. A survey nearly a half century later revealed that people of 110 national backgrounds now live on the Old South Side.

Milwaukees Brady Street neighborhood, bounded by the Milwaukee River, Lake Michigan, Ogdon Avenue, and Kane Place, is arguably the most densely-populated square mile in the state of Wisconsin. A mix of historic shops, single-family homes, apartments, and condos, Brady Street boasts of great diversity that draws from many distinct eras. It began in the mid-19th century as a crossroads between middle-class Yankees from the east and early German settlers. Polish and Italian immigrants soon followed, working the mills, tanneries, and breweries that lined the riverbank. After these groups had assimilated and many of their descendents moved to the suburbs, the hippies in the 1960s arrived with their counterculture to fill the void. By the 1980s, the area fell into blight, neglect, and decay; now, a true model for new urbanism, the Brady Street neighborhood is in the midst of a renaissance.