Why the Trinity Lutheran fire diminishes us all
I could see the smoke a dozen miles away. We had just wrapped up the first day of photography for “Around the Corner with John McGivern,” the PBS series now in its eighth season, and I was coming home from Oak Creek, one of this year’s featured communities. A stiff wind had been blowing from the north all afternoon. As I drove up I-94 toward Bay View, a broad plume of black smoke was spreading out from a point that seemed to be somewhere in downtown Milwaukee. This, I thought, must be a big one.
When I got home and turned on the news, there it was: a four-alarm fire that had engulfed Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church on North 9th Street and West Highland Avenue. One of Trinity’s nearest neighbors, only a parking lot away, happens to be Milwaukee PBS. The “Around the Corner” crew came back from work that Tuesday evening to find the streets blocked and a steady mist falling from the fire hoses. The station had been evacuated shortly after the blaze started, and a power outage had actually knocked Channel 10 off the air for a few minutes.
Early the next morning, I biked up to the scene under an achingly blue spring sky that made the devastation I witnessed seem unreal. Trinity’s back was broken. Where there had been a roof were only open air and charred beams. Windows were shattered, a spire had collapsed, and the ground behind the
police tape was strewn with flameblackened shingles. The entrance was unscathed, but behind Trinity’s doors was a scene reminiscent of World War II Europe after a bombing raid.
A knot of onlookers had gathered on the street across from the church, some obviously distraught, others busily snapping photos with their cellphones. The TV stations had all sent crews, and I was briefly part of the small-scale media circus. Was I aware, one reporter asked, of any other major fires in Milwaukee’s history? Well, yes, I replied. There was the 1883 hotel blaze that killed at least 75 people and the 1892 Third Ward fire that left 2,500 homeless. The Trinity conflagration was serious, but it was hardly history-making.
What it was, and on a heartrending scale, was history-destroying. The Ninth St. church was one of Milwaukee’s oldest, and the congregation it housed is much older. Trinity Lutheran traces its roots to 1847, when the city of Milwaukee was one year old and transplanted Germans had just begun their rise to ethnic dominance. American Lutherans have always been famously fractious, splitting over theological fine points into a multitude of synods: Missouri, Wisconsin, Buffalo, Ohio, Iowa, and literally dozens of others. Trinity became the mother church of Missouri Synod Lutheranism in Milwaukee, planting the denomination’s flag in a little church on Fourth and Wells and worshiping in German.
Growing with the city, Trinity eventually outgrew its original quarters. In 1878, on land donated by hardware king John Pritzlaff, the congregation started to build the church it just lost. The Gothic Revival landmark was dedicated on Easter Sunday in 1880 with a threeservice extravaganza that included an English sermon — an innovation at the time. A contemporary observer called Trinity’s new home “the finest church edifice within the Missouri Synod” and proceeded to give his readers a virtual tour: “The auditorium is cruciform in shape, and the first impression of the visitor is one of beauty and repose. No pillars intervene to break the view, while the dull blue ground color with its traversing bands and border of delicate gray, causes a delightful restfulness and peace to creep over the senses.”
Not that the new church put its congregation to sleep. Trinity was a wideawake assembly whose membership quickly climbed to 1,600, and a well-attended school next door trained the next generation in the faith. The surrounding neighborhood was extremely dense, and it is likely that a majority of Trinitarians, both old and young, walked to church and school. The heady aroma of beer being brewed in the Pabst plant across the street was a constant presence, but that was hardly a drawback for such a German community.
Trinity evolved over the decades, weathering the anti-German hysteria of World War I and moving with its members into the American mainstream. Although change accelerated after the Second World War, tradition still had a strong pull. Trinity welcomed its first African-American member in 1949 but did not hold its last German service until 1959. The building, too, evolved. Decades of coal smoke dulled the warm glow of the Cream City brick exterior, but the parish took generally excellent care of its landmark. In 1979 the church earned a listing on the National Register of Historic Places— the architectural equivalent of all-star status.
In recent years, Trinity has experienced the same challenges that face nearly all of Milwaukee’s downtown churches. The neighborhoods in which they were planted have eroded away, dissolved by wave after wave of commercial and institutional development. Most of today’s buildings stand as lonely old sentinels in transformed environments. The only way for their congregations to survive, much less thrive, is to attract members from throughout the metropolitan area. Trinity currently counts 300 members on its rolls — a significant number, to be sure, but hardly the 1,600 who filled the pews when it was new.
Whatever its size, Trinity has continued to follow the faith of its fathers and mothers since 1847, maintaining a steadfast identity as a “conservative, caring” congregation in the heart of Milwaukee. I have no doubt that the parish will endure, perhaps on the same site and maybe even with artifacts salvaged from its old home. But the likelihood of rebuilding the church to its prefire dimensions and details seems remote indeed.
The loss is felt most sharply by the people of Trinity, of course, but the recent fire touches the entire community. Whatever your faith or lack thereof, historic places of worship are among the most important fixtures on our skyline. They represent our collective memory. They connect us with our immigrant ancestors. They stand as enduring monuments to faith. They are irreplaceable touchstones of identity and indisputable makers of place. What would Milwaukee be without the ensemble of Protestant landmarks in Yankee Hill or the denser, more diverse thicket of steeples in Walker’s Point? Both are among the greatest concentrations of church buildings in the Midwest, and our older neighborhoods are dotted with individual examples just as noteworthy. Trinity was one of the most distinguished.
In a city of great churches, the disaster of May 15 feels like a death in the family. The fire displaced one congregation, but Trinity’s loss diminishes all of us.
John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, writes for the Ideas Lab section on the first Sunday of each month (www. johngurda.com).