Casablanca revisited
Grant helps in effort to add to historic register
Among jazz musicians visiting Milwaukee in the 1930s, the home of Anna and Adam Dietz was known as the Casablanca Hotel.
The Dietzes’ home, at 2463 N. Palmer St., became a safe place for famous African-American entertainers, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, to stay when they came to Milwaukee, according to Jim Draeger, state historic preservation officer at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Because of the segregation of the time, those entertainers couldn’t stay at hotels in the city, so the Dietzes turned their home into a hotel for them.
Adam Dietz was employed as a harness maker; so far, there is little information about Anna.
Draeger hopes a $26,164 grant recently awarded to the Wisconsin Historical Society by the Department of Interior will help the society learn more about the Dietzes and their home, and will increase the number of listings in the National Register of Historic Places in Wisconsin associated with African-Americans.
“The National Register is by definition meant to capture the broad fabric of the American experience,” Draeger said. “Yet certain communities are underrepresented in that historical record, African-Americans.”
The Department of Interior awarded a total of $500,000 in grants to add places to the register associated with underrepresented communities across the country.
The Wisconsin Historical Society is one of 12 organizations from Alabama to Washington state that will receive a grant to prepare nominations for properties representing Hispanic Americans, African-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women and LGBTQ Americans, according to the Department of Interior.
“These grants will enable us to work with partners to identify important sites that will help tell a more complete story of our jour- ney,” Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in a news release.
The Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Office plans to use the grant funding to increase awareness and recognition of historic African-American people and their impact in Milwaukee by nominating four properties to the National Register of Historic Places.
African-Americans have lived in Milwaukee since the 1830s. In 1890, a quarter of all Wisconsin African-Americans lived in the city, but by 1930, more than 70% of the state’s African-American population resided in Milwaukee, according to the Department of Interior.
After preliminary research, the historical society identified a few properties that warrant- ed more investigation once the grant money was received, including the Dietzes home and the Kilbourn State Bank Building, 2741 W. Fond du Lac Ave., which housed Wisconsin’s first African-American owned and operated bank.
Draeger said the goal of this project is to help the community “recognize the role that African-Americans have played in building the city of Milwaukee and their history’s importance to the history of the broader city.”
After the project is completed, Draeger said, there will be a public event so the historical society can present its research findings and highlight the impact of African-Americans in the building and growth of Milwaukee.