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The Allen-Bradley Clock Tower is a four-sided clock that sits on top of the ALLEN-BRADLEY Building (now Rockwell Automation) on the South Side of Milwaukee. Local ARCHITECT Fitzhugh Scott designed the tower. The clockworks were built by Allen-Bradley, which specialized in electrical controls, while the clock faces were created by Super Sky Products in MEQUON.… Read More

Milwaukee’s built environment reflects the ideas of the architects and builders who designed and constructed the area’s commercial, industrial, and residential buildings. The roots of the profession began in the city’s first decade and flourished in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A proliferation of architectural firms in the twentieth century accounts for Milwaukee’s… Read More

Like all urban areas, early Milwaukee faced many issues when it came to burying the dead. There were concerns with sanitation and the threat of disease, the competition for space with businesses and housing, and the need to properly memorialize those who died. Milwaukee’s early cemeteries had neither the permanence nor the grandeur of its… Read More

The Milwaukee City Hall is located on the site of the previous “Market Hall” on the triangular parcel of land between Market Street, Water Street, Wells Street, and Kilbourn Avenue. In 1891 an architectural contest was held to replace the “Market Hall” with a new headquarters for city government. Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb submitted… Read More

The exchange of goods is fundamental to city life, and the shape of commercial activity in Milwaukee reflects the geographic expansion of the city and the economic, technological, and social patterns framing the city’s development over time. Modern Milwaukee began as a series of competing settlements on the Milwaukee River and grew into a major… Read More

The modern movement toward environmental protection in Milwaukee was rooted in the frontier settlement’s first efforts to control water pollution to protect public health. From this beginning, the dynamic interplay of time, technology, science, commerce, and population growth resulted in a gradual expansion of this narrow focus to the conservation of natural resources, starting with… Read More

Historically courthouses were places for resolving legal and political matters. As community social spaces, they also demonstrated civic pride, serving as symbols of the ideal of American justice. As such the architecture of courthouses reflected their important role in community life. However, over time, courthouses, and later “justice centers,” became more specialized. Modern courthouses tend… Read More

Milwaukee’s nineteenth-century brick-makers fired the local red lacustrine clay, which contains a high content of calcium and magnesium, to produce distinctive, soft golden-yellow bricks. “The Cream City” nickname that attached to Milwaukee in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century suggests the dominance of this creamy-yellow colored brick during the city’s first seven decades. As early as… Read More

The duplex, an apartment house with two units, became a popular housing choice in Milwaukee during the late-nineteenth-century period of rapid industrial growth and residential development. By 1911, a study of Milwaukee conducted by the United Kingdom Board of Trade, described it as the city’s most common house-type. Although a few are found in wealthier… Read More

Milwaukee was Native American land until the 1830s. The Potawatomi lived in the area in the early 19th century but lost their lands as a result of coerced treaties that forced them to cede the territory to the United States for American settlers. Most of these people were removed west to a reservation in Kansas,… Read More

The Eschweiler & Eschweiler architectural firm was one of the most prolific in Milwaukee’s history, designing everything from community spaces, private homes, and places of worship, to industrial factories and commercial buildings. Some of their most notable buildings include the MILWAUKEE GAS LIGHT BUILDING, the MILWAUKEE ARENA, the Wisconsin Telephone Co. Building, the Milwaukee County… Read More

Opened in 2018, the Fiserv Forum is the home of the Milwaukee Bucks, Marquette University Men’s Basketball, and an array of other sports and entertainment events. It is located at 1111 Vel R. Phillips Avenue, directly north of the site of the BMO Harris Bradley Center, which it replaced as Milwaukee’s primary sports and entertainment… Read More

The iconic Gas Company Flame was added on top of the ESCHWEILER-designed WISCONSIN GAS BUILDING in 1956. Standing 21 feet and weighing 4 tons, the beacon provides navigational light for Lake Michigan vessels and indicates the local weather forecast by its color. The flame contained neon and argon tubing, but by spring 2014 was replaced… Read More

Grand Avenue was an officially designated Milwaukee street from 1876 to 1926. It first developed in the 1850s as Spring Street, where wealthy residents built large estates on the outskirts of the city. Over the successive decades, their mansions emerged as a suburban “gold coast.” By the 1920s, however, that suburban character dissipated as downtown… Read More

  The Helene Zelazo Center is a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE (UWM) venue for performing arts. The building was dedicated in 1923 as the second home of Congregation Emanu El (which became CONGREGATION EMANU EL B’NE JESHURUN in 1927), a Jewish synagogue. The building was designed by Robert A. Messmer & Bros., a firm also responsible… Read More

As the city developed, Milwaukeeans razed, transformed, and replaced outmoded buildings, infrastructure, and other elements of the landscape. Some groups expressed concern that these changes destroyed history and a “sense of place.” They worked to mark, preserve, restore, and repurpose historically significant sites and structures. Milwaukee’s first historic preservation efforts emerged in the late-nineteenth century.… Read More

Throughout the twentieth century, the A.O. Smith manufacturing plant was a site of intense activity. Housed on a sprawling multi-acre, multi-block site on the city’s North Side, A.O. Smith mass-produced automobile frames, turning out 100 million by 1982. Such industrial activity transformed the neighborhood surrounding the plant, as the company, which at its peak employed… Read More

The greater Kettle Moraine stretches from Kewanee County south through Walworth County. It was created when the Green Bay and Lake Michigan “lobes” of the Wisconsin Glacier (it had six lobes all together) retreated some 10,000 years ago. The retreating glacier left behind geological indentations, known as kettles, and deposited debris—silt, rocks, and boulders—that produced… Read More

Europeans derived Lake Michigan’s name from the Anishinaabemowin word mishigami, meaning “big lake.” It is the second largest Great Lake by volume and third by area surface; it is the only one located entirely within the United States. Milwaukee’s economic development has been made possible by the Lake’s harbor, which provided protection from storms and… Read More

From approximately 1900 to 1930, the bungalow was a popular house type throughout the United States. The term “bungalow” was borrowed from nineteenth century English usage and the form from the British Indian colonial adaption of a Bengali house. Within America, regional variations of the one- to one-and-a-half story house with a large porch developed… Read More