Crossroads:
A redevelopment reclaims the past for the future
Historic Mitchell Street gets a shot of new life with remodeled public library.
There’s a new library in town. It has the usual assortment of books, movies, music and magazines, but the facility also features every amenity you’d expect to find in a 21st-century temple of knowledge: computer stations, study rooms, cozy reading chairs and even a “maker space” where young people can try out the latest audio and video technologies. At 23,000 square feet, the new branch is the city’s largest, and it represents a $6 million commitment to the surrounding neighborhood.
What’s different about the “new” library is that it isn’t new at all. The Mitchell Street branch of the Milwaukee Public Library, which will be formally dedicated next Saturday, is housed in a historic building on one of the city’s most historic thoroughfares. The facility fills the cavernous ground floor and the spacious lower level of the former Hill’s Department Store at S. 9th St.
On the four floors above the new library, and in a free-standing structure to the north, are 60 luxury apartments carved out of former retail space by Gorman & Co., a durable presence on the Milwaukee development scene. Built at a cost of $15 million, they are the first new market-rate apartments on the street in decades. Together, the Mitchell Street Library and the Alexander Lofts are a pioneering mixed-use development that’s drawing national attention.
The property’s retail history goes back to 1907, when Isaac Goldmann, a RussianJewish immigrant, opened his Lion Store on the site. (Isaac’s brothers had started the better-known Goldmann’s Department Store practically next door in 1896.) The Lion Store roared along profitably until 1919, when the building was destroyed by a fire so intense that it melted the stained-glass windows on St. Anthony’s Church across the street.
Isaac Goldmann rebuilt immediately, and on a grander scale than before. His new Lion Store — the present library/ apartment building — opened in 1920 with 50 departments, from kitchenware in the basement to yard goods on the main floor and corsets and carpets on the upper levels. The store’s windows, noted the Milwaukee Journal, were so large that it was “practically unnecessary to use artificial light.”
Goldmann retired nine years later and leased the building to Hill’s Department Stores, a New York-based chain that owned 30 establishments in “many of the leading cities,” including several in Wisconsin. The new Hill’s occupied a middle ground, both physically and commercial-
ly, between the entry-level merchandise of Goldmann’s to the east and the somewhat more upscale offerings of Schuster’s (later Gimbel’s) to the west.
Together, the three department stores and nearby Sears anchored what was unquestionably the South Side’s downtown for most of the 20th century. From 5th St. to 15th St., Mitchell St. was lined with businesses that sold furniture, shoes, hats, men’s and women’s wear, baked goods, wedding gowns, meat, sheet music, jewelry, candy, and anything else a South Sider might want, including bowling balls. Second-floor offices housed scores of doctors, lawyers, dentists, photographers and even architects, among them my cousins, Leon and Francis Gurda.
Mitchell St. probably peaked in the decade or two following the Second World War. “You couldn’t walk that street on a Friday evening,” recalled Milt Pivar, 89, who began his career at Goldmann’s in 1942 and ended up owning the business. “It was just wall-towall people.” Hill’s, Goldmann’s, Schuster’s and Sears competed fiercely but, as Pivar put it, “There was plenty of business for everyone.”
That business began to dry up in the 1960s. As customers left for the suburbs in droves, self-contained shopping centers sprang up to serve them. Southgate, Milwaukee’s first center, opened just two miles from Mitchell St. in 1951, and others followed. They posed the same threat to older retail districts that online shopping poses to brick-and-mortar stores today.
Hill’s Department Store was an early casualty of the shift in American retailing. The Mitchell St. store closed
in 1963, a decision its managers attributed to “unprofitable operations in a building expensive to maintain and lacking in customer services.” The parent company found other things to do, developing the chain that became Toys “R” Us.
As other mainstays followed Hill’s into retail oblivion, the remaining merchants on Mitchell tried desperately to win back their customers. In 1975, they attempted to “mall” their street — the same mistake that decimated downtowns in Green Bay, Stevens Point, Wausau and other Wisconsin cities during the same period.
Mitchell Street’s sidewalks were widened, several side streets were closed, acres of businesses were cleared for parking and vest-pocket parks were installed in former alleys. What the merchants were doing, with substantial help from the city, was clogging their own arteries. As circulation slowed, so did business, and the exodus of old standbys — The Grand, Penney’s, Mayer-Krom, South Side Sausage — continued without pause.
The damage was not undone until 1995, when virtually all the “improvements” were torn out and the street was returned to its former configuration. By then, Mitchell was fast becoming an international marketplace. There was still an assortment of traditional businesses — Mitchell never remotely resembled a ghost town — but the street’s accent was changing. Latinos had replaced Poles as the South Side’s dominant ethnic group, and Latino-oriented businesses were joined on Mitchell by Indian, Pakistani and Southeast Asian merchants.
It was into this heady mix that the Milwaukee Public Library stepped in 2015. I’ve been an MPL board member since 1993, and it was increasingly clear that the Forest Home Avenue branch, just off Mitchell on 14th St., was too small and too out-of-date to meet the neighborhood’s needs. After a careful study of other locations, we chose the Hill’s building on Mitchell St. Here was an opportunity to enliven a historic commercial district, preserve a structure that richly deserved it and, most important, serve an area bursting with young families.
Developing a mixed-use project was a foregone conclusion. We had already followed that strategy on Villard Ave. and North Ave., in both cases replacing obsolete branches with gleaming new facilities that shared space with apartments. Those publicprivate partnerships have added critical mass to their streets and given the city much more bang for its buck. When you don’t have to build a shell from scratch, you can spend more on what’s inside. How many central city libraries in America have fireplaces?
Not that rehabbing the Hill’s building was easy. A succession of tenants, from a hardware store in the basement to a punk rock club on the roof, had not been particularly kind to the structure, and dropped ceilings on the main floor obscured a wealth of architectural details. But everyone involved saw the landmark’s potential: MPL, Gorman & Co., and our respective design teams, HGA Architects and Quorum.
It’s doubtful that the project would have happened without state historic preservation tax credits, a fact that makes Gov. Scott Walker’s recent decision to slash the program seem incredibly short-sighted. With those credits, Gorman was able to develop market-rate apartments rather than income-qualified housing. I interpret that decision as a clear sign that the energy radiating from the Historic Third Ward has edged south through Walker’s Point and finally reached Mitchell St., where it eventually will be joined by a wave of investment moving north from Bay View.
But for now, the focus is on the library. Stepping into the new branch is like stepping back into the golden age of Mitchell St. commerce. After years of neglect, Hill’s terrazzo floors, ornate plaster columns, mahogany railings and floor-to-ceiling windows are all shining again. The grand opening starts at 10 a.m. Saturday and runs until 5. Drop by for a fresh look at how the past can be creatively reclaimed to brighten our city’s future.