In Crossroads:
He was the ‘father of the parks system’ for county
Charles Whitnall’s lasting legacy for Milwaukee County was its parks. John Gurda column.
I practically grew up in his park. When my family moved from the old South Side to Hales Corners in 1955, it didn’t take us long to discover Whitnall Park and its tributary green space, Root River Parkway. Whenever aunts and uncles came to visit, Whitnall’s centerpiece — the Boerner Botanical Gardens — was a mandatory stop. (My father loved to compare his chrysanthemum beds with the work of the pros at Boerner.) In winter we skated on Whitnall’s frozen lagoon — the smell of woolen mittens drying on the warming shack’s stove has lasted a lifetime — and in summer my friends and I spent hours under the Forest Home Ave. bridge, trying to coax crayfish out of beer cans passing motorists had tossed into the Root River.
When I was old enough to bike across busy Forest Home, Whitnall Park was the first place my gang pedaled to after school in spring and fall. We knew the trails nearly as well as the resident deer, and our forays continued into adolescence. As eighth-graders, we gathered to smoke cigarettes and utter forbidden words in a creekside spot we called Rubber River, just downstream from a bridge where the older teens parked.
My greaser period was mercifully short-lived. Even though my gang broke up after grade school, I remained a Whitnall Park regular, and my visits have continued to the present. Even as a kid, I knew that the park wasn’t really Whitnall’s, whoever that might have been; this square mile of green space obviously belonged to all of us. But I have developed, over the years, a deep appreciation for the man whose name it bears.
Charles B. Whitnall was hailed as the father of Milwaukee County’s park system even during his lifetime. He deserves, in my opinion, a place in the pantheon of Wisconsin environmentalists that includes more-celebrated figures such as Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Increase Lapham, for it was Whitnall’s vision and, just as important, his tenacity that played the decisive role in the development of Milwaukee’s world-class park system. At a time when that system is under duress after years of starvation budgeting, a look back at the founder’s vision might help us re-establish our priorities.
Charles Whitnall’s biography is fairly straightforward. He was born in 1859 in what is now the Riverwest neighborhood, the son of an English immigrant and his Milwaukee school teacher wife. After a brief foray into sign-painting, the elder Whitnall became a power in the local flower trade, developing a phalanx of greenhouses behind his home on the west bluff of the Milwaukee River near Locust St.
Charles followed his father into the flower business, but he soon developed interests that went far beyond petals and stems. Whitnall paused for a rare look back at his career in 1931, when he led a reporter and a photographer from the Milwaukee Journal on a day-long, 75-mile tour of the county’s emerging park system. (Their story appeared on June 21, 1931.) Whitnall recalled that his family had nearly cornered the market on wedding and graduation arrangements by the time he was a young man. “At first, I enjoyed the decorating work immensely,” he said. “But gradually it began to impress me with its futility. I saw that I was not creating real beauty. ‘This,’ I said to myself, ‘is like making a stage setting. There is nothing real about it.’
“So I abandoned decorating and went into landscaping. There I could create an effect that would not be faded and limp the morning after. For a little while, landscaping satisfied me ... but in 1900 I was all caught up on that work too. My satisfaction in it had lasted only 10 years before I had a sense of incompleteness. One home might be made beautiful, but it would not fit in with the next. I came to realize that landscaping ought to be done on a larger scale. ‘The only way to take care of a few homes is to take care of all of them,’ I said to myself. That is how I came to be interested in city planning.”
Planning would be Whitnall’s passion
for the rest of his life, but it was not the only one. After leaving the plant business, he became a walking oxymoron, earning his livelihood as the officer of a local trust company and at the same time rising to prominence in Milwaukee’s newly organized Socialist Party. Whitnall’s trust experience prompted him to found the cooperatively owned Commonwealth Mutual Savings Bank in 1912; his political ties led to his election as city treasurer (for one term) in the Socialist landslide of 1910.
Whitnall’s unusual combination of business acumen and political skills provided a solid foundation for his third and most fruitful career: as Milwaukee’s chief planner for nearly 40 years. He was appointed to the city’s Public Land Commission and the county’s Park Commission in 1907, eventually becoming secretary of both. Although the posts were largely uncompensated, they enabled him to leave a permanent imprint on Milwaukee’s landscape.
Despite the fact that he was self-taught, Whitnall was a voracious reader and a rigorous thinker. He developed a planning philosophy that proceeded organically from humanity’s relationship with nature. “Nature is more than a city ordinance,” he told the Journal reporter during their 1931 tour. “Natural landscape exerts an important influence…. I am convinced that most physical ills
and a good portion of our economic ills are due to the crowding out of natural influences.”
Whitnall believed that it was the particular role of local government to restore the influences of nature and, even though the Depression was under way, he expressed high hopes. “No one in the city of the future,” he predicted in 1931, “will be more than five or six blocks from a beautiful recreation ground.” But Whitnall had no interest in placing parks just anywhere; his organizing principle was the watershed. “Remember,” he told his journalistic companions, “the valley is the proper unit in the development of any territory.”
Whitnall’s ideas found mature expression in his 1923 master plan for Milwaukee County’s parks. The plan featured a double loop of parkways following the county’s rivers, creeks, and lakeshore, with individual parks strung along the loop like pearls on a necklace. The resemblance between Whitnall’s plan and today’s system is uncanny. “We are seeking,” he wrote, “to conserve not only God’s country but Humanity.”
It goes without saying that Charles Whitnall would be aghast at the current state of the county’s parks. Despite the best efforts of an overworked and underfunded staff, the backlog of deferredmaintenance projects is so huge that no one knows its exact dimensions, and signs of decay are unmistakable. Whitnall would view the system’s steep decline as a form of civic suicide. The parks, he would say, are everyone’s birthright, part of our common wealth, and we neglect them at the peril of our collective soul.
There is no better guide to a sustainable solution than Charles Whitnall himself. Making his grand vision a reality was the work of decades, and reclaiming it will take just as long. The planner encountered spirited opposition and frequent defeats throughout his career, but he never retreated to an airy elitism or a frosty despair. Whitnall stayed in the game whatever the weather and regardless of the score, and that persistence may have been his greatest strength. Every setback inspired one more speech, one more article, one more attempt to rally public support. If that meant spending an entire day with a reporter on his own time, Whitnall was glad to oblige.
One of the highlights of that marathon 1931 tour was a stop at “Hales Corners Park,” a 600acre tract in the southwestern corner of the county that had been acquired only the year before. “Today,” wrote the Journal reporter, “it is a beautiful, wild section of land where little springs bubble up and with watercress and mint along a trickling stream.”
In the very next year, that park, which is still the county’s largest, was named in Whitnall’s honor. The naming was a clear recognition of his towering role in the system’s development, but Whitnall was far more interested in public use than personal glory. Just as he would have wished, I still think of it as my park after all these years — mine, yours and, above all, ours, an inheritance from past generations that is here for us to use, appreciate and draw inspiration from as we work to recapture the vision that brought it to life.