John Gurda hosts tour celebrating Milwaukee as a city built on water

“The Global Water Center in the Menominee Valley is the epicenter of Milwaukee’s vision for being a hub of global water technology. Since it opened for years ago last September, there has been an amazing transformation. And that energy is spreading out to Read Street Yards, which is a city developed business park with an emphasis on water related businesses. The area was just a freight yard and tracks, and not a whole lot of work going. But now it is part of a greater resurgence of interest and investment.”

“It is hard to imagine what used to be Menominee River back in the early years of native settlements. It was a half mile wide and four miles long, with reeds, brushes, cattails, and beds of wild rice. In the Chippewa language, Menomonee literally means ‘rice eaters,’ so this was a garden, grocery store, transportation route, church, and supply supply center for native people. In those early years there were at least seven villages within two miles of downtown. Every one of them had access to water, so being built on water began really early in the history of the area.”

“In my new book, I am just finishing a chapter called “Singing the Dirty Song.” It is the job of MMSD (Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District) to make that song a lot cleaner. It works to protect Lake Michigan and all its tributaries. Since the deep tunnel opened back in 1993, they have treated a long-term average of 98.5% of Milwaukee’s waste water. The national standard is 85% so MMSD is way ahead of the game.”

“Looking at a map of the Great Lakes, in virtually all the major settlements were based at a river mouth. Back in the day when they were established, people arrived by schooners. There is this all-water route from the East Coast at Albany on the Hudson River, to Buffalo at Lake Erie. So people could sail to the Great Lakes, and all the way down to Chicago. That journey might have taken two months, but it was faster than trying to drag your goods across the world and into to the American heartland. We have a 1,000 mile route all-water route to the interior. So water is absolutely a Milwaukee lifeline, going way back to the very earliest years. Much of the lakefront area was wetland, from downtown to the Third Ward and Walker’s Point. Some of the biggest civil engineering programs in the early years of the area were the landfills or ‘made land’ as it was called.”

“Even twenty years ago in Milwaukee, the 6th Street Viaduct was the most forlorn bridge in city. It still had the streetcar tracks on it, because no one thought enough to take those out. It went right over the Menomonee Valley and the intent was to get over the valley and get out of the area. Under John Norquist’s administration, who was mayor from 1988 to 2004, he had to burn some political capital to create a kind of Calatrava inspired design for a new 6th Street bridge. Then the intention was to bring people down to the Menomonee Valley, so it opened the door. No one could have imagined that Harley-Davidson would spend millions of dollars in 2006, at the site of an old DPW yard, to build a museum to tell their story.”

“Canal street was aptly named because it was a network of canals. It is also the baseline for Milwaukee’s address numbering, zero hundred. Facing West, to the left everything is a South address, and to right are North addresses. It is the very center of Milwaukee. The other impact that the Menomonee Valley had was it divided the Southside from everything else. While the North territory was subdivided by east and west and smaller enclaves, the Southside has always just remained the Southside. So it is much more monolithic than other sections of town.”

“Because of the canal system, the Menominee Valley became the industrial center of Milwaukee, on a par with the Ruhr valley in Germany. It was home not to thousands but tens of thousands of jobs. Almost like a bucket brigade, a stream of workers would pour in at the start of every day and then pour out in the afternoon. The Menominee Valley would breathe in workers and then breathe them out again. They would walk from as far south as Lincoln Avenue and as far north as North Avenue, or take the streetcar. The area had a huge concentration of employment.”

“After the 1950s, as people start moving out to the edges and highways replaced trains, the area became what is called a derelict industrial zone. But it was always known as a kingdom of shrieks and smells due to the slaughter houses.”

“By the Mitchell Park Domes, there is a second hill that the kids call “suicide hill.” That is where Jacques Vieau put his trading post way back in 1795. It is considered by some to be the first white settlement in Milwaukee.”

“Milwaukee’s smallest neighborhood is Pigsville. It has about 250 households with 11 Streets, and 7 and them are dead ends. So people do not get there unless they live there or they are lost. I did a book back in the 1980 for UWM about three neighborhoods called “The West End, Merrill Park, Pigsville, Concordia.” I tried really hard to find out where that name came from. There were lots of inventive explanations. One was that the river has a really sharp bend and the theory went that when the rain came down really hard it would wash pigs off farms up in Wauwatosa. They came down river and then when the current slowed because it had to make the turn, the pigs just kind of wonder up into the neighborhood. Another theory was that sometimes trains taking pigs to market would derail at the same curve, so they would wander up. And another was that a man named George Pigg had stagecoach stop there, but I found nothing to prove he existed.”