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St. Catherine’s Residence was established in 1894 to provide temporary housing to the large numbers of young women moving from rural areas to Milwaukee for jobs or schooling. The home, originally located at 1131 Sycamore Street (later West Michigan St.), was first known as St. Catherine’s Home for Working Girls. It was administered by the… Read More

This institution is the major training facility for Roman Catholic priests who serve in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. It also forms young clergy who serve in other parts of Wisconsin and sections of the Midwest. Moreover, some of its graduates are found in Rome and Africa. Although it currently does not support an accredited academic… Read More

St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, located on 51st Street just south of Oklahoma Avenue, is currently the main place of worship for Milwaukee’s Serbian Orthodox community. The congregation has its roots in an influx of Serbian immigrants to Milwaukee in the early twentieth century, a migration that called for the creation of a new church.… Read More

Founded in 1866 as the first Polish parish in Milwaukee (and, perhaps, the first urban Polish church in the United States), St. Stanislaus, Bishop and Martyr served as “the mother church for more than twenty Polish parishes” across the area. A towering, twin-spire church topped by golden domes arose at 5th and Mitchell Street in… Read More

Despite its urban location, Milwaukee is a beneficiary of Wisconsin’s investment in protecting natural areas. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources manages the state’s forests, parks, and trails. Three are housed in Milwaukee County: Hank Aaron State Trail, Havenwoods State Forest, and Lakeshore State Park. Winding through an area once home to Native Americans and,… Read More

The Story Hill neighborhood is on the west side of the City of Milwaukee. The neighborhood’s boundaries are roughly the Menomonee River to the north, Frederick Miller Way to the south, Hawley Road to the west, and US Highway 41/Miller Park Way to the east. But parts of it extend along Blue Mound Road to… Read More

The city of Milwaukee combined three formerly competing villages when it incorporated in 1846. Because the villages had been striving to be unique, each had its own street layout and street-naming scheme. Juneautown, east of the Milwaukee River, was named for its French Canadian fur-trading founder, SOLOMON JUNEAU. Many of its streets were given the… Read More

The U.S. Department of Labor defines a labor strike as “a temporary stoppage of work by a group of workers (not necessarily union members) to express a grievance or enforce a demand.” The prevalence of strike action has waxed and waned over the course of Milwaukee and the nation’s history, as particular industries have grown… Read More

Any conversation regarding local government in Wisconsin must begin—and ultimately conclude—with mention of the State (or, to be more precise, of the territories of Michigan or Wisconsin, succeeded in time by the State of Wisconsin). In essence, either the state constitution or its statutes determine the purposes, powers, and prerogatives of local governments, down to… Read More

A ridge created by the thawing Wisconsin glacier 10,000 years ago traverses eastern Waukesha County from north to south near the Milwaukee County line. It is a small segment of the Great Lakes Basin boundary, which encompasses all of Michigan and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and the Canadian… Read More

In the United States context, suburbs typically are low-rise, residential municipalities beyond the commercial and industrial cores of central cities, sprinkled as they are with denser, older, multi-family housing stock. In the greater Milwaukee area, the processes and motivations for decades of suburbanization were varied and multifaceted. Some suburbs developed as enclaves of professionals and… Read More

Launched in 1968, Summerfest is a multi-day event held in June and July featuring music, food, shopping, and family activities that bring more than 800,000 people to the Henry W. Maier Festival Park on the Milwaukee lakefront. Billed as “The World’s Largest Music Festival” by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1999, fans of… Read More

According to the 2009-2013 American Community Survey, some 27,000 people in the Milwaukee metropolitan area identify themselves as of Swedish ancestry. Despite these numbers, the state’s and Milwaukee’s Swedish population, arriving in their largest numbers in the late nineteenth century, never represented a substantial portion of the population either in the city or outstate, and… Read More

The Swiss population in Milwaukee has not been a large one over the years, but Swiss immigrants and their descendants have contributed to Milwaukee’s political, religious, and cultural climates in critical ways. In 1930, some 4,000 people in the metro area reported their father’s birthplace as Switzerland. In the early twenty first century, some 8,000… Read More

Milwaukee’s Syrian population dates to the late nineteenth century, when villagers from Ain Bordai, near present-day Baalbek in Lebanon, arrived in Chicago for the World’s Fair. At the time, Syria was a province in the Ottoman Empire. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the region came under… Read More

For most American sports fans, tailgating brings to mind cool fall days, with smoke wafting through the parking lot in the hours before kickoff. However, for MILWAUKEE BREWERS fans, tailgating is the public manner in which one eats, drinks, plays, and socializes before the first pitch at Miller Park, where the parking lots function as… Read More

Milwaukee’s taverns were shaped by complex societal changes and largely defined by the lasting influence of the city’s large German population and significant brewing industry. Scattered along networks of dirt and plank roads connecting small settlements in Milwaukee and its surrounding counties, early wayside taverns were more than simply a place to get a drink.… Read More

Telecommunications technologies use electronic signals over cables and the electro-magnetic spectrum to allow people to send and receive information quickly over great distances. Milwaukee has a history of ever-changing technologies, with varying levels of competition and regulation of the services used to connect Milwaukee to the world. Telecommunication began in Milwaukee when the Erie &… Read More

Television debuted in Milwaukee during the medium’s “Golden Age” from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. The city’s local networks were pioneers broadcasting on both the VHF and UHF frequencies. At least fourteen commercial and public television networks competed for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) construction permits and then viewers in Milwaukee during that era.… Read More

Temperance, or the crusade against alcohol in Jacksonian and antebellum America, resulted in the first support groups for alcoholics, the first local license laws, and then (in the 1850s and mostly in the Northeast and Midwest) statewide laws banning the manufacture and sale of liquor. The movement coincided with the settlement of Wisconsin and Milwaukee,… Read More