MILWAUKEE: A CITY BUILT ON AN ABUSED RESOURCE
The river was a sewer below the dam, a playground above
You can hardly pick up the newspaper these days — or open it online — without reading a story about water. The new Foxconn plant is going to need rivers of the stuff. Waukesha is replacing its radium-tainted supply with Milwaukee lake water. Petroleum shipments to Jones Island have raised new environmental concerns. Waterfront development is remaking the Harbor District. High bacteria counts have closed popular beaches. Whether the news is good or bad, today’s headlines are often slightly damp to soaking wet.
I just added a stream of my own to the cataract of information. On June 25, the Wisconsin Historical Society launched “Milwaukee: A City Built on Water,” a 225-page chronicle of the multiple ways in which our community has used — and abused — its liquid resource over the generations. Thanks to two gifted designers, Jim Price and Kate Hawley, it’s a good-looking volume, with more than 250 illustrations, including dozens of stunning contemporary photos by Christopher Winters.
The book did not come into the world in the usual way. It began as a simple lecture in 2007 — no slides, no sound — and became a PowerPoint program in 2013. Two years later, the story reached a much larger audience as a one-hour documentary on Milwaukee Public Television.
I thought the documentary would be the project’s capstone, but Kathy Borkowski, who was then director of the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, saw possibilities I didn’t. Shortly after the program aired, Kathy asked if I’d be willing to tell the story in book form. After some initial hesitation, I decided that there was more to say — a lot more. In a year or so of research and writing, I turned a 7,500-word television script into a 45,000-word manuscript, and “Built on Water” made its way from screen to print instead of the usual opposite route.
You never know what you know — or don’t know — until you sit down to write about it. Some of the territory in “Built on Water” was very familiar. The chapter on the Jones Island fishing village is based on a master’s thesis I completed in 1978. Great Lakes maritime history and Milwaukee’s park development are other subjects I’ve covered in some detail.
But there were revelations as well. I had underestimated, for instance, the Jekyll-andHyde character of the Milwaukee River before 1900. To simplify only slightly, it was a sewer below the North Ave. dam and a playground above. In the very first years of white settlement, the lower river was as pristine as any wilderness stream in northern Wisconsin today. As Milwaukee’s population soared past 100,000 in 1880 and 200,000 just a decade later, the waste from all those people — and all their horses — went straight into the nearest river. The first sewers aggravated the problem, conveying the filth from every house and street to the Milwaukee and its sister streams. As the system expanded, the Milwaukee Sentinel (July 23, 1874) printed an appallingly candid headline: “Milwaukee River to Be Made One Vast Sewer.”
Dredging had slowed the stream’s current to a muddy crawl by then, allowing the septic soup to simply cook on the hottest summer days. “Built on Water” has two full pages of eyewitness, or perhaps nosewitness, accounts of the downtown river at its sewage-laden worst. This complaint from a Sentinel reporter (Aug. 13, 1878) is typical: “Not a citizen of Milwaukee possessing a nose to smell, or a stomach to endure, but is already prepared to unanimously denounce the filthy, villainous, unhealthy, plaguebreeding condition of the river . ... In a day when an east wind prevents the sluggish current from setting outward, as was the case yesterday, life in the vicinity of East and West Water streets is simply unendurable.”
In 1888, Milwaukee attempted to remedy what was delicately called the “river nuisance” by digging a tunnel under the East Side and
pumping lake water through it to flush the putrid stream. The business district soon smelled better, but the accumulated filth had only one place to go: Lake Michigan, and Lake Michigan, of course, was the source of the city’s drinking water. The folly of connecting your toilet to your faucet was apparent in a rising death rate from typhoid fever and other diseases. It was not until 1925, when the Jones Island plant opened, that Milwaukee began to treat its sewage rather than just moving it.
Above the North Ave. dam, by contrast, the Milwaukee River became Wisconsin’s first water park. At a time when weekends lasted a single day and air conditioning was decades away, Milwaukeeans were starved for outdoor recreation, and the upper river blossomed accordingly. A dam built for an aborted canal in 1843 had created a long, narrow lake extending to Capitol Drive. Warmer, calmer, and more accessible than Lake Michigan’s beaches, the flowage was thronged on summer Sundays.
Three swimming schools, all run by Germans, provided docks and diving boards just above the dam. A water toboggan called Shoot the Chutes crowned the east bank at North Ave. Canoe clubs, boathouses, and beer gardens dotted the upstream banks, and wealthy Germans maintained lavish summer homes in the vicinity of Kern Park. An amusement park with the requisite roller coaster, carousel, and water slide — admission ten cents — occupied the site of Hubbard Park, and the ravines of Riverside Park were open to everyone for free. Water taxis plied the upper river, stopping at all points of interest for a 15-cent fare.
From North Ave. to Capitol Drive, the upper river was Milwaukee’s “in-town Up North” for several decades, thriving until pollution, the automobile, and inland alternatives gradually drained its life away. Today, with the dam gone, nature has reclaimed the streambanks, and the former beehive of activity has become an attractive urban wilderness called the Milwaukee River Greenway.
The river story is by no means the only transformation charted in “Built on Water.” One chapter follows the evolution of our lakefront from a smoky rail corridor to the cherished green space of today, and the book contains what I’m confident is the best one-chapter history of our sewer and water systems ever written — mostly because no one had ever bothered to write one before.
There’s an ulterior motive to all this story-telling. My hope is that by showing how far we’ve come from the dark days of toxic rivers and sooty lakefronts, the book will foster an enlarged sense of our own generation’s possibilities. The progress we’ve made on the water front is significant, but the recovery is fragile and the path ahead full of challenges. When the future of such an essential resource is at stake, a trip back to the headwaters is always a good idea.
John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, writes for the Crossroads section on the first Sunday of each month.