The Upper East Side of Milwaukee our neighborhood in the 1970s

Our Neighborhood:

 

Milwaukee in the 1970s was a city in transition. A city famous for its breweries and beer consumption, heavy industry, machine shops and factories, it was slowly but relentlessly being eaten by the rust belt. Breweries began to close, industry to relocate, and experts prophesied that the death of the American City was upon us. The population began to fall as more and more people moved to the surrounding suburbs. The downtown shopping area began to see empty storefronts. Workers that had held factory jobs allowing them to raise families began to lose those jobs as businesses closed. Milwaukee’s decline or transition would be slow through the 60s to the 80s, and would avoid the drastic decay that cities such as Detroit saw.

 

Milwaukee’s citizens thought of their city as the best “Small town-large city in America.” Milwaukee was made up of ethnic and industry neighborhoods. The Lower East Side was Italian, the South Side Polish, the 3rd ward Irish and then Italian, and the Central City German transitioning into African American. The ethnic makeup of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods would slowly change as the 20^th century wore on, but the local flavor is retained to this day. Each neighborhood had its own shops and business districts. Large factories such as Allis Chalmers transformed or built whole neighborhoods as workers wanted to live close by in inexpensive housing of their own. Above all, Milwaukee neighborhoods were dominated by two institutions; taverns and churches. We had more of both than almost any other city in America, some on the same block. In fact, some blocks contained a bar on each corner, leading to the term “Corner tap.” Each neighborhood was a whole community in itself. Anything one needed was within walking distance or a short streetcar ride away.

 

Our new home on Downer Avenue was in the neighborhood roughly known as the Upper East Side.

Sandwiched between the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and the Lake, the Upper East Side was populated by a diverse mixture of middle-class families, students, and University professors and their families. In the ‘60s and ‘70s it became the city’s cultural center and trendsetter. The houses were built mainly in the 1920s and possessed charms as varied as their architecture. The neighborhood was special, and remains much the same today, only barely touched by the disease of plastic sameness so prevalent in our American culture. It passed nearly untouched through the phase of “Urban renewal” which bulldozed so much of America’s unique neighborhood architecture in the name of progress. It survived for the most part, because it was insulated and filled with owner occupied family houses owned by prominent citizens who would fight against overt changes in their neighborhood. In the 1970s, every city had neighborhoods like this. When relatives came to visit, they would mention that the Downer Avenue section of the East Side reminded them of a treasured neighborhood back home where bookstores and ice cream parlors sat side by side, and everyone strolled the sidewalks seemingly in no hurry to get anywhere particular.

 

 

 

The biggest external influence that dominated life in the Upper East Side was the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Concerns regarding its growth and what that would mean to the neighborhood were always on resident’s minds. The 1970s saw student protests against the Vietnam War spill onto the surrounding streets. Following the uncovering of our secret bombing of Cambodia and the covert escalation of the war under Nixon and Kissenger, the students held mass protests, sealed off the streets, and took over the University. I remember my father escorting Mom from work at the Student Union, and carrying me on his shoulders through the seated throng of protesters. Unaware of danger at that age, I looked out at the strikers with interest from my high perch. From the late ‘60s through the middle of the ‘70s, the residents referred to most of the students rightly or wrongly as “Hippies.” The whole youth movement became a confused morass in which political idealism, new music, drugs, long hair and strange styles of dress merged together to become what was referred to as the “Counter Culture.” Instead of influencing the average American, it often frightened people. The important political and social messages and ideals were lost or misted over by “free love” and the drug culture. The idealism of the 1960s became helplessly lost and confused in the 1970s. The reaction to this fear lead directly to Nixon’s presidency as the common American went to the polls with their own safety in question. East-Siders may have wanted us out of Vietnam, supported local food cooperatives and alternative press, were often active in the woman’s movement, supported equal rights and housing access, but they drew the line at having groups of wild young adults congregating in the neighborhood where their children played.

 

To protect Milwaukee’s East Side neighborhood and others against what the then Chief of Police Harold Brier considered undesirables, special squads of police were formed called the “Tactical Squads.” These goons did what they could to disrupt student protests, ad-hoc rock concerts, and gatherings of youth in area parks. Their heavy-handed ‘tactics’ were barely legal at best. Members of the youth culture did not help things either. Far from realizing that they needed to clean up their act if they wanted to influence others, they instead seemed to be increasingly trying to shock Milwaukee’s citizens with ‘love ins’, or free magazines such as Kaleidoscope and the Bugle American. These local publications actually had some wonderful content, but it was characteristically buried behind advertisements for drug paraphernalia and cover stories no one over thirty years old wanted to read. Progressive East-Siders such as my father were torn between support for the political and social ideas of the youth, and being repulsed by the counter-cultural elements and disruption of neighborhood safety. During the 1970s, Dad spent much of his time staring out our front window on the lookout for “Teenagers” who were in his opinion “all up to no good.” “Teenagers” in his view were anyone under 25 dressed funny or with long hair. This sort of split personality between progressive social views and ‘Archie Bunkerism’ was quite common.

 

The University didn’t just supply hippies. Art students drew and sketched on the lawn of Mitchell hall where through open windows in summer music majors could be heard. Philosophy students argued their theories over coffee, and mathematicians walked into trees. Everywhere there were people of all ages that were socially aware and had opinions. Then there were the professors…

 

Quite a few University professors and their families lived in the immediate three blocks surrounding our house. We knew many of them on a first-name basis. Since our house was on Downer Avenue, which was a main route to the University, we could observe them daily. Most were brilliant, if a bit eccentric. Some of them were so immersed in their own thoughts that they marched to school every day oblivious to the world around them. Many were dressed in sport coats and sweaters. I remember an Irish professor of literature who seemed to live in a local dive bar, a professor of comparative religion who was always talking to himself, and a professor of history who had an air of superiority and had run off with one of his graduate students. We knew a teaching assistant who had the most pungent body odor and always wore a long tattered wool scarf. Engaging and always smiling, he was very fond of his beer, and late one evening he tottered past our house on his way home from a local bar. He staggered back and forth down the street, until with a crash of broken branches he fell into a hedge. There he would spend the night, only to wake up and toddle the rest of the block or so to his lecture. One professor of physics stood out above all others. He was a friend or relative of a family we knew, sported a huge beard and long bushy gray hair, and always rode a bike. He rode the bike rain or shine, winter or summer, dressed in a pair of shorts and with bare legs. For some reason, he believed that fresh air was good for his sperm production, and thus never wore long pants. Even today, if one walks down Downer Avenue past the University you are likely to encounter a bearded professor riding a moped dressed in a patched tweed jacket in the middle of a 90-degree day.

 

The Upper East Side in the 1970s was filled with children. The stately houses, distance from urban turmoil, and the easy availability of the beautiful expanses of Lake Park contributed to the ideal cosmopolitan atmosphere that parents desired, as well as the safety they wanted for their children. Milwaukee had a great park system rivaling any major city and perhaps the finest in America. Milwaukee’s socialist mayors described our park system as a place where “The people could go to breathe,” and it is due to this philosophy that we owe the legacy of our parks. Frederick Law Olmstead, a socialist who also designed New York’s Central Park, designed Lake Park. We citizens of the East Side, especially us children seemed to spend much of the summer virtually living in the park. It was well supplied with playground equipment, baseball fields, a seasonal ice-rink, and other facilities. It also retained a subtle wildness contained in its many ravines, in which on any given day could be seen deer, songbirds, or pot smoking teens, among other flora and fauna. During picnics with multiple families, we kids ran all over the park, exploring every bridge, wooded ravine, or jungle gym. What strikes me today is the lack of fear children and our parents had while in the park. I don’t think we were ever warned about lurking pedophiles, drive-by shootings, abductions by space aliens, or any other looming threat that causes parents today to place their children on leashes while wearing hockey armor and sporting a GPS tracking device. The times were just simpler. Despite political assassinations, urban unrest, war, inflation, racism, and other woes of the day that worried the minds of parents, children were allowed to be free and engage in unstructured and mostly unsupervised play. It was a wonderful time to grow up.

 

Above all, there was Lake Michigan. The great lake would keep the neighborhood cooler in summer, and provide us kids with a free place to swim. During overcast evenings and nights, we fell asleep to the distant low bass of foghorns. The lake seemed the biggest body of water in the world to us kids, and we could look endlessly to the east, north and south without ever seeing the other side. It was our ocean. On Independence Day, the Schlitz brewery would sponsor a huge fireworks display on the lakefront that we could walk to. Unlike many other cities, Milwaukee protected it called its “Riviera”, and no development marred the lake view that anyone could have by simply walking down Lincoln Memorial Drive. One drawback though, was the periodic die-off of the alewife, a smelt-like fish and invasive species that would from time to time in the ‘70s cover our lake shore with their rotting carcasses, causing us East-Side residents to wish we lived anywhere else. The smell was indescribably bad.

 

Although the neighborhood was quite safe, like any other it had its less desirable areas. I rarely ventured alone past Murray Street to the west. We kids knew Murray as “Rip-off Street.” If one was unlucky or careless, venturing further west than this could result in getting harassed, chased by bullies, or having your bicycle stolen. At least that was the legend. None of these things ever really happened to us children, instead they always seemed to happen to a friend of a friend. It was more of a psychological boundary than anything else. On one side of the street, we felt safe, while only twenty feet away lay the fearful unknown.

 

Our neighborhood certainly had its share of kooks and eccentrics, but unlike today, we knew who they were and where they lived. In the ‘70s, we knew all of our neighbors for several blocks. Everyone knew the goofballs. We didn’t need the local news to scare us every evening with tales of pedophiles and predators lurking behind every door and peeping out of windows. We were just warned every now and then by our parents to avoid “Old lady Fussbudget’s house,” or not to bother “Mr. Loner.”

 

Although some of the residents could be considered characters, the biggest source of weirdoes in our neighborhood was its position between the University and the Lower East Side of North Avenue and Brady Street; both areas being magnets for eccentric people who wanted to loiter around. Every day several transients, former drug addicts who had lost their marbles, and other familiar characters wandered down Downer Avenue. I remember a guy who constantly laughed out loud as he walked. For years we saw him pass our house laughing and laughing as his ratty and too-small clothes dissolved on his back. Every once and awhile someone must have cleaned him up and he would sport a new pair of shoes and a haircut, but then as time went on he would decay back to his old look which was rather like an hysterical laughing Frankenstein monster with long hair and a beard. Dad always warned me to stay away from him, and called me into the house when he was spotted, but he never seemed to do any harm. He just laughed and walked, and walked and laughed. He was known locally as “ The Laughing Guy.”

 

Another character that made a weekly appearance was the “Potato Chip Guy.” He was a transient elderly man with a huge gray beard who wore a decaying black trench coat. Under the coat were stored dozens of large bags of potato chips. He hung out at bus stops eating bag after bag of chips between trips to the local food store to re-supply his stock. Again, this character never hurt anyone, and seemed to be concerned with nothing but eating potato chips, hoarding potato chips, and procuring more potato chips. He never seemed to speak a word to anybody.

 

Mom vaguely knew one of the local characters from the University, and tried her best to avoid him. He wore a white hardhat and laboratory coat, and rode around on a bicycle accosting innocent passersby and talking to them about arcane subjects. It didn’t take long for the poor unsuspecting victim to get the point that there was something odd about this guy, and excuse themselves from the conversation.

 

Our local cat-lady lived on Downer several blocks south of us. She was a very intelligent and eccentric woman who served in local community groups with my father. She always wore heavy coats and scarves and carried a flashlight. She also smelled suspiciously like something that died. Her house was always dark and cold because she had the electricity and gas disconnected. (Thus the coats and flashlights…) Copious juniper bushes and wild overgrown weeds hid the front of the home, so that if you didn’t know there was a house there you might think it was an abandoned lot. There seemed to be rumors that she kept a lot of cats, and when the police came to her door for some reason or another, her home was found to be in an unlivable condition, filled with felines and feces. She was taken away to God knows where and her house was bulldozed.

 

Several local characters were conspicuous Jesus freaks. The most notable drove around in dilapidated black station wagons with ranting religious writing scrawled everywhere in white paint. They used loudspeakers to broadcast themes of sin and repentance, and predicted the end of the world and hellfire. There seemed to be several of these nuts and their cars over the years.

 

The main shopping district in our neighborhood was on Downer Avenue between Park Place and Webster. It was only five blocks from our home; so simple shopping could be accomplished with relative ease. The whole area was modeled on a European village square, centered on St. Mark’s church, and still retains much of its former charm. It was the center of the Downer avenue community, and a common meeting place. There was a Sentry food market and Sendik’s, an upscale grocery store with excellent produce. Later came the Coffee Trader with exotic roasted coffees, fresh baked bread, and imported cheeses. In the mid 1970s I was sent three times a week to the Coffee Trader to buy a loaf of sourdough rye bread. For years the clerks at the Coffee Trader referred to me as “The sourdough kid.” Interesting small retail shops lined the avenue, and one could purchase craft supplies, imported woolens, Earth Shoes, visual art, candles, and get your hair cut by a barber with a real working barber pole.

 

My earliest memories of shopping expeditions pre-date our owning a car. Instead, we owned a succession of broken down two-wheel wire shopping carts. One of the carts was barely held together with old rope. These carts stood on end, and were supposed to fold up. (Hopefully only when you wanted it to, and not on its own accord.)

Mom and Dad would tow the cart to Sentry, where once filled with several grocery bags, it became hard to maneuver. Dad would carry two large bags in his arms, so it was my task as a five-year-old to help Mom lift the cart over curbs at street corners. (Handicap equipped corners came much later) Several times, I remember the carts falling over or the collapsing, spewing groceries to the street. It always seemed to be raining or snowing when this happened. If it were sunny, one could fill the old cart with bowling-balls and it would make the trip home, but if even a single drop of rain or snow fell, the cart began to wobble like a drunk, and the bottom would then fall out. It only did this when one was the maximum distance from home. The groceries would have to be piled back into the wet brown paper bags, and returned to the cart. We then would continue home towing the broken down cart, its geriatric wheels wobbling and squeaking.

 

When it snowed, my sled was substituted for the cart. During snowstorms, we would not be the only family shopping by sled or toboggan. Without a car, it was the only way to get groceries home.

 

Sendik’s market on Downer had a machine that squeezes oranges before your eyes and turns them into orange juice. The oranges were loaded into the top and then like a pachinko game would tumble down through a hole where an apparatus would squeeze out the juice. You could see the whole thing happening in front of you, as the front of the machine was made of glass. Every time my parents shopped at Sendik’s I stood in front of the machine, and had to be dragged away when it was time to go. The smell of orange juice that was so incredibly fresh was a real treat.

 

My favorite store to visit was Downer Hardware. At the time, it was one of many neighborhood hardware and general stores on the East Side, but as time went by and other shops closed their doors, it became unique. Downer hardware had a blended smell of paint thinner, fertilizer, pest killer, and oil that was perfume to my young nose. They had a key-making machine, and I watched with fascination as the staff ground keys for customers. There was always something fascinating to watch or something new and interesting to see in the hardware store, along with lots of stuff you were warned not to touch. Like many small local establishments, they had to cater to the neighborhood needs as a bit of a general store. One could purchase alarm clocks, American flags actually made in this country, cookware, lawn chairs, nuts and bolts, glues, coolers, and twenty varieties of mosquito repellent. Downer hardware also carried a decent selection of Christmas decorations, all which were over thirty years old and perpetually on sale. I spent hours looking longingly at the pocketknife display. They must have had over fifty different versions of what we then called ‘jack knives’. Everything in the store in those days was covered in a thick patina of dust, even the employees. After a trip through the store, you could relish the smells of hardware the rest of the day, as you took it home with you on your hands.

 

Two first class pharmacies were in the same little area. Lake Park Pharmacy and Bellview Pharmacy both smelled like candy and castor oil, and had varieties of goodies now missing from our big-box world. There was a comfortable atmosphere to these little corner stores, and the clerks, usually smiling older folks with thick glasses and white smocks often knew you by name. Important to us kids, they had penny candy and shelves of comic books to look through while your parents did stuff you could care less about.

Next to Downer Hardware were the Blue Ribbon Pet Shop, and a café-soda fountain. Both were to be destroyed in a fire in 1975.

Past Bellview to the south was the Downer Theater; Milwaukee’s oldest Film Theater in continual operation, and across from that was the most famous of local landmarks, the Popcorn Wagon.

 

The Popcorn Wagon was Milwaukee's oldest, and possibly the oldest wagon of its type in the country. Some residents say it dated back to 1916. If you have never seen one, they resemble a small circus wagon in appearance.

 

Besides popcorn, the wagon sold a large collection of nickel and penny candy. One could get: wax lips, spaceship candy with little candy balls inside, plastic pixie sticks filled with pure sugar that no child could manage to open, a miniature plastic garbage can filled with garbage shaped candy, a tiny coffin filled with candy body parts, wax soda bottles filled with stuff that made you sick, packs of baseball cards that contained a slab of vulcanized chewing gum, candy lipstick, JuJubes which accidentally removed your fillings, and various other crazy treats that us kids found irresistible.

 

On any given day in the summer, one could join long lines of kids anxiously waiting their turn for goodies with a dime or two in their pockets. Children with sugar highs ran around the Popcorn Wagon in circles, while other kids that had consumed a lethal combination of Pixie Sticks, circus peanuts, cotton candy, and popcorn lay on the pavement clutching their stomachs in agony. Each day in summer each of us consumed more sugar than the entire population of India. One of my favorite candies was a jawbreaker. For ten cents, you could get a jawbreaker the size of a billiard ball made up of a thousand layers of flavors that varied from orange, grape, lemon, red (which tasted like chemicals), and a myriad of other colors and tastes only remotely related to anything in nature. These things were so large that we kids could barely get them in our mouths, and once inserted, we walked around the rest of the day unable to speak and drooling all over ourselves, incapable or unwilling to remove them.

 

Our two east-side theaters (Downer and Oriental) have survived the efforts at urban progress (destruction), and remain much as they were when they were built, full of charm and representing a slower time. Unfortunately, as I wrote this, the Popcorn Wagon is being relocated to make way for a parking garage. Progress anyone?

 

One block to the north of our home and across the street from the University was Riegelman's Downer pharmacy. It was an old-fashioned drugstore with a lunch counter and soda fountain, and had an extensive candy selection. Serving the neighborhood from 1969 to 1984, it was a place of refuge for students and staff of the University as well as local characters and children. For 45 cents one could consume as much coffee as one wished while reading the newspapers, eating wonderfully greasy burgers, talking to the local cat-lady, or debating Schopenhauer with wild-haired philosophy students. It became an East-Side institution in the 1970s.

 

Six blocks to the west of us on Oakland Avenue between Linwood and Locust streets were a Ben Franklin store and East Side Foods. Mom would ride her bike to this shopping area carrying me on the back in a child’s seat. East Side Foods was an inexpensive grocery store where she often found bargains on food that was still good but ‘had to go’. Ben Franklin was an original five and dime variety store that filled a need on the East Side for a mini-department store. They carried pets, craft supplies, clothing, bathroom and kitchen accessories, party notions and decorations, greeting cards, and a vast supply of toys and candy. Those were the days of cheap toys made in Japan out of recycled tin. The reverse side of the tin toy was often covered with ideograms advertising beverages. I loved to come here because the toys were so cheap that I often could pester Mom into buying me something just to shut me up.

 

On special occasions, we would visit other specialty shops in Milwaukee. At Christmas, we would take the bus to Glorioso’s Italian market on Brady Street. In business for over sixty years at the time of this writing, Glorioso’s was a throwback to the neighborhood ethnic markets of the early 20^th century. We bought chestnuts to roast in our oven, hard Italian salamis and exotic cheeses covered by cloth and suspended from strings, and ogled the various canned specialty goods such as smoked oysters and stuffed grape leaves. I loved the smells of the deli. Often on the same trip, we would proceed to Usinger’s on Old World Third Street. Usinger’s is another treasure of Milwaukee. Since 1880, they have made the most divine sausages in the German tradition. The sales shop had (and still has) a European charm of by-gone years. It featured murals of German Sausage-making elves painted in 1906. The murals depicted the elves in the various processes of production, from capturing the pigs by the tail, mixing the meat with special spices, all the way to the table full of delicious steaming platters of sausage surrounded by happy pudgy elves with beer steins. In our family, Usinger’s sausage was a treat to be savored, and as we waited in line, Dad would tell stories of his boyhood, when he accompanied his Grandfather to local German butchers. We savored: knackwurst, braunschweiger, bratwurst, natural casing wieners, landjager, and summer sausages, always purchased from the ‘seconds’ bin. When we got home with the treasured box of sausage, Mom would put the Knackwurst on to boil, and once on our plates, it would be consumed with smacking noises accompanied by German mustard and pumpernickel bread.

 

Another destination we frequented from time to time was Nick Topping’s International House and Imports located in the Sydney Hih building on the east side of Downtown Milwaukee. Nick was a progressive who marched in civil rights protests and was best known as the man who brought the Beatles to Milwaukee for a concert. As a leftist, he and Dad had long conversations about politics and society, while Mom shopped for exotic Pilafs, and I picked out imported candies from China. The whole shop had the smell of a middle-eastern bazaar.

 

Being poor, Mom and Dad were always looking for inexpensive entertainment. One outlet was Pat and Tom’s Murray Tap, an inexpensive neighborhood bar on the Lower East Side. A sort of dingy and dark smoky atmosphere pervaded the place. Not able to afford a baby-sitter, my parents dragged me along with them. It took little coaxing. The place was full of local characters that entertained me. They bought me Beer-Nuts and Hershey’s bars and I usually ate so many that I got sick. Mom and Dad had a few quiet .25-cent beers and had a chance to people watch and a change of pace. The reader may recoil in horror that my parents were so irresponsible as to take me into a bar when I was only six, but they didn’t see it that way, and I loved it. I still remember the revolving Schlitz beer signs and the jukebox that I could never figure out how to play. (I had no coins-duh!)

 

Through the years, the Upper East Side has changed little. Unique businesses came and went, only to be replaced with other interesting stores. Citizens and local characters wandered into history, but others took their place. It seems that the neighborhood lives outside of time, attracting similar people each year that want a progressive cosmopolitan experience. I like to think of it as the “Greenwich Village of Milwaukee.”