Milwaukee’s street names have long been a work in progress
Confusion, Prussian history, and other miscellany reigned
If you haven’t been to downtown Milwaukee in a while, you might notice a few new signs on your next visit. Dr. Martin Luther King Drive now extends down the former Old World 3rd Street all the way to Wisconsin Avenue. The Fire Department headquarters on North 7th and West Wells streets has been named for Alonzo Robinson, the city’s first Black architect. And North 4th Street is now Vel Phillips Avenue, honoring the first African American (and first woman) to hold elective office on both the city and state levels.
It’s about time, many of us would say. In a city whose Black population is close to 40% of the total, there have been precious few public signs of the African American presence.
Who could disagree that a major group should see itself reflected in the surrounding landscape?
There are some caveats to consider, but first let me describe a few earlier changes.
It took until 1930 for city’s street names to make sense
Milwaukee’s pioneer street-naming system was the original hot mess, a hodgepodge resulting from the city’s origin as a trio of competing settlements separated by rivers. From the very beginning, and for decades after, many streets changed names whenever they crossed a
stream. State Street, for instance, was Martin east of the Milwaukee River, Wells was Oneida and Clybourn was Huron. The mismatch went both ways; Wisconsin Street became Grand Avenue west of the river.
The offsets on the south side were even more nonsensical. What are now South 1st through South 5th streets were, in order, Clinton, Reed, Hanover, Greenbush and Grove. The district’s numbered streets didn’t start until what is now South 6th Street, which was 1st Avenue on our ancestors’ maps. To compare an old address to the south side’s current street grid, researchers reflexively add five.
It wasn’t until 1930, after years of study, debate and hopelessly confused visitors, that Milwaukee’s street system was more or less rationalized. Despite considerable grumbling, the south side, with its smaller population base, was forced to adopt the north side’s designations. A basic stability has characterized our street names ever since. The city’s north-south axis follows a simple numerical grid (except in the lakeshore neighborhoods), and a typically urban mélange dominates the latticework of east-west streets.
As Milwaukee grew, each generation deposited a new layer of nomenclature, with pioneer names (Juneau, Kilbourn, Walker, Vliet, Wells) most common in the center and a less predictable assortment in newer neighborhoods. Over the decades, developers and city officials created pockets of presidents on the south side (Grant, Lincoln, Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland), U.S. states in Bay View (Illinois, Indiana, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania), and even Sir Walter Scott locales on the east side (Ivanhoe, Woodstock, Kenilworth). Scores of street names honored local luminaries, usually in public service (Whitnall, Wahl, Bruce, Downer) or business (Mitchell, Burnham, Plankinton, Layton). Others simply preserved the names of the families who had once owned the land (Morgan, Kane, Howard, Loomis, Chase). The names piled up like geological deposits, each stratum incorporating the titans and trends of its time.
Historian Carl Baehr tells all these tales and many more in “Milwaukee Streets: The Stories Behind Their Names,” a 1995 book that has long been the standard reference on the subject. Given the city’s long-standing regard for roots, it’s no surprise that Baehr uncovered a number of ethnic stories. Until recently, Hibernia, the Latin word for Ireland, ran through a portion of Tory Hill, an extinct Irish neighborhood buried beneath the Marquette Interchange. Germania, a short street on the north side, is no more, but Teutonia Avenue, not far away, somehow survived the anti-German cleansing campaigns of World War I.
At least one ethnic street name sparked a conflict.
Bismarck Avenue once traversed the heart of Milwaukee’s south side, honoring the “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck, who unified the German states in 1871. The trouble was that most of the street’s residents were Polish immigrants, and Bismarck was their mortal enemy. Under his rule, Prussia occupied western Poland, suppressing Polish culture, confiscating Polish land and drafting young Polish men (my great-uncle very nearly among them) into the Prussian army. The name was an insult, and local Poles wanted it changed to Kosciuszko, for the celebrated Polish freedom fighter, Tadeusz Kosciuszko. As Carl Baehr tells the story, Milwaukee’s German aldermen refused, and the conflict remained unsettled until about 1890, when the two sides compromised on American Avenue. The street is now South 15th Place.
More than a century later, the same assertive spirit surfaced in the same neighborhood. The old Polish enclave had become a Latino stronghold by the late 1900s, primarily Mexican, and local residents wanted to honor a hero of their own. In 1996, following considerable controversy, South 16th Street was renamed South Cesar Chavez Drive, after the charismatic labor leader who organized California’s agricultural workers.
Honoring Cesar Chavez
I played a small part in that decision. In 1993, I became a charter member (and later chair) of the Citizen Advisory Committee on the Naming of Public Buildings, Facilities and Streets, a volunteer body with one of the longest names and lightest agendas in city government. The committee was apparently created to deflect political pressure from the Common Council on controversial naming requests, particularly after the flap over the first renaming of North 3rd Street for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1984. As is their prerogative, the current council finds that cover unnecessary, and our role has largely been reduced to hearing requests for honorary designations rather than permanent changes.
The Advisory Committee voted to recommend changing South 16th Street to Cesar Chavez Drive in 1996, but not before some reasonable questions were raised — questions that have surfaced again in the recent batch of renamings. The desire of any major group to have its presence acknowledged in the civic landscape is logical and laudable, a simple matter of justice. The challenge is finding the proper balance between change and constancy.
What practical impact, for instance, do name changes have on emergency services, mail delivery and general wayfinding? In downtown Milwaukee, the former North 3rd, 4th and 7th streets are now King Drive, Phillips Avenue and James Lovell Street, the last named for the Milwaukee-raised Apollo astronaut. Do we risk returning to the cartographic chaos of the frontier period? Probably not, but stability is generally a quality you like to see on a map. And why not look at east-west streets rather than the numbered grid?
The larger question is one that comes up in practically every historic preservation debate. Like the built environment, the named environment is a legacy handed down to us from generations past. Do we insist on preserving it in pristine condition, or do we change it whenever conditions seem to warrant? Milwaukee Public Schools appears to favor the latter approach; so many MPS school names have changed that the roster of today’s buildings is practically unrecognizable to most of the city’s adults.
What, if anything, is at stake here? It may be useful to see our public names as a sort of civic library, a passive repository of past associations and priorities. However seldom it’s actually consulted, however infrequently its stories are told in detail, the library inscribed on our map links us with our past. Is anything lost when Victor Berger School, named for the godfather of Milwaukee Socialism, is renamed for Martin Luther King?
On the other hand, what opportunities for inclusion are lost when we attempt to freeze the status quo? How can we pass up any reasonable chance to say, loudly and clearly, that this is everyone’s city?
The questions get more vexing the longer we look at them. When does revision become erasure? How do you respect the present and still honor the past? How do you add without subtracting?
There are no definitive answers. In the end, we can only heed advice that’s worth following on any well-traveled street: Even when the light is green, proceed with caution.
John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email: mail@johngurda.com