Getting Around Washington Park
As early as 1888, Milwaukee had a streetcar and railroad presence. In 1898, the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company bought out the Milwaukee Street Railway Company, which was organized in 1890. After the purchase, the concept was to build interurban lines, even out to Waukesha. The thought process behind building more lines was to distribute transportation to the suburbs, thus creating more ways for people to get Downtown to work. Throughout the years, many more lines were added and expanded towards other suburbs and interurban areas. This caused more main transportation streets to be created for the addition of the streetcar.
There were several streetcar lines that went by Washington Park by 1909; they were located on W. Lisbon Avenue, W. Lloyd Street (formerly W. Pabst Avenue), and W. Vliet Street. Between 1936 and 1955, the trolleybus began to replace the streetcar, making it necessary to remove the track lines in the streets and replace them with trolley cables. It took a long time to change over the transportation means due to the great deal of construction involved. In the years following the trolleybus takeover, the fare was increased, which led to a decrease in schedules and trolley lines. By 1965 all of the lines and trolleybuses were replaced with the diesel bus, which dramatically changed the infrastructure of the road. The deconstruction of the trolley cables occurred along with the widening of the main roads to accommodate the increasing number of buses and cars. As cars became more affordable, highways and garages also became more prevalent in the city. With the construction of garages on the lots, neighborhoods became a lot denser, and alleyways began showing up in residential areas. Overall, the means of transportation has changed drastically over the years in Washington Park since 1888. |
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The Railroad
The Milwaukee Road was founded in 1847 as the Milwaukee & Waukesha Rail Road. It underwent several name changes before becoming the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad in 1928. The Railroad went bankrupt in 1985 and was purchased by Soo Line. The Soo Line railroad is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canadian Pacific Railway, who owns the tracks, although the major operator of the track today is Wisconsin & Southern Railroad.
The section of the track that runs through the Washington Park neighborhood was built as a service line that served Miller Brewing, Harley-Davidson, Tower Automotive, and several other smaller businesses. The line still serves Miller Brewing and several of the smaller businesses. |
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The Streetcar and the Automobile
During the 1920s and 1930s, there was not only a running train system, but also a huge automobile boom in Milwaukee. As a result, the neighborhoods surrounding S. 16th Street saw an increase in residential development:
Thanks to the automobile, the opportunity to move a bit farther away from work was maximized. Bungalows became the house of choice in many of these new neighborhoods...In the 1920s, real estate agents advertised that the new...neighborhood was for Americans - while a Polish-American real estate agent claimed that the bungalow rather than the Polish flat represented the Polish house of choice. This vast development of new homes could not have happened without the transportation from the city through the use of both automobiles and the streetcar, which was just off of W. Lloyd Avenue (formerly W. Pabst Avenue) and extended to the Pabst Farms in Wauwatosa. The existence of the streetcar made land just west of Washington Park easily accessible from Downtown Milwaukee and made it possible for the Washington Heights neighborhood to grow and prosper.
It was not just a boom in housing development that occurred in this area after the transportation explosion; the newfound means of transportation also helped build up four historical religious sites. The Mt. Olive Lutheran congregation moved to its new location on W. Washington Boulevard in 1923, and in 1925 the St. James Evangelical Lutheran Church was constructed on N. 60th Street. The 1920s also saw the construction of two other Lutheran churches: St. Thomas and Washington Park. Additionally, Milwaukee's first conservative Jewish synagogue, Beth El, was built in 1923, bringing the Jewish culture to the Washington Park area on top of the already-present German culture. The streetcar that ran through this area was not only the main connection between Washington Park and the heart of the City of Milwaukee, but it allowed people to live farther away from the city in outlying planned communities. The interurban railway network that existed in Milwaukee eventually reached Kenosha to the south, Watertown to the west, and Sheboygan to the north. Downtown Milwaukee's Public Service Building served as the network's hub and central office. Despite cuts due to increasing automobile use, use of the railway continued into the 1950s. |
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The Streets of Washington Park
Washington Park has long been a melting pot of culture and even more so in today's day and age. The history of this place is something that is not just carried down by oral tradition of its residents and their tales of past times, but it also reveals itself through the grid system of roads which defined each parcel of land and created Milwaukee's circulation arteries.
The "Burgage Plot," as it has come to be known, has dimensions of 125 feet by 25 feet and was the most basic unit of city planning, being used in nearly every part of the Milwaukee grid. The use of the grid was a systematic strategy that created a language in which houses could be placed into groups based on the block they occupied. The grid not only eased the placement and construction of houses, but it allowed for very regular and sometimes painful efficiency, perhaps creating boredom in the repetitive land plots in the city. A solution to this problem seemed to be found when people sought out such a figure as Frederick law Olmsted to design Washington Park, one of several parks he would design in Milwaukee County at the turn of the 20th century. The city park was the collective "backyard" of the neighborhoods and a place where the city could break from the grid to create a personal green area. The roads mapped out in the 1910 Sanborn map show a dense grid-work starting on the northern and eastern sides of Washington Park. W. Lisbon Avenue is one of the only streets to break from the grid pattern and create a diagonal path of circulation. Perhaps this decision was made to move goods more efficiently, using one diagonal route as opposed to two straight roads that would lead to the same point. It seems that expansion typically began toward the East and moved westward into newer areas like present-day Wauwatosa. The 1927 Sanborn map shows an increase in the grid density as the houses began to completely engulf the park and ingrain it into the community. Major streets such as W. Vliet Street, W. North Avenue, and W. Lisbon Avenue cut through the site at odd angles and break the monotony of the regular grid which surrounds the park. Accommodations for the Menominee River as well as the railway would provide reasonable cause to break from the grid. Washington Park was, and is, a force which brought this community together, and it is evidenced through the road systems that were implemented. This system and park together show how a neighborhood was created that is its own and has its very own genuine character. |
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Transportation's Impact on Washington Park
Since its creation in 1891, Washington Park and its surrounding neighborhood have undergone drastic physical changes; streets have evolved, businesses have grown or relocated, and access to the highway system has been added. Most of these changes can be directly linked to improvements and the evolution of transportation.
The site of the Washington Highlands, just to the west of Washington Park, was originally part of a hops and horse farm owned by Milwaukee brewer Frederick Pabst. In order to provide access to Downtown Milwaukee, Pabst opened a street in 1891 that ran east-west through the middle of his land, W. Pabst Avenue (modern-day W. Lloyd Street). Soon, permission was granted to the Milwaukee and Wauwatosa Rapid Transit Companies for the construction of a streetcar line along the same road. Although the streetcar system is no longer in existence, W. Lloyd Street is still a major roadway through the Washington Park area. Prior to Washington Park Zoo's closure in 1963, when the animals were relocated to the current facility, a highway was put in bordering the park's northwest corner. This allowed for mass transit in the area and subsequently encouraged people to buy cars. In Milwaukee, the original routing of US 41 used W. Lisbon Avenue east to N. 27th Street, then south along that road to the Illinois state line. After the Stadium Freeway was built in the 1960s, US 41 followed that road from W. Lisbon Avenue and south across I-94. The installation of US 41 forced many thriving businesses out of their locations. Today there is a bridge and a county-owned vacant lot where there were once two gas stations, a dry cleaning business, and a restaurant. One could argue that removing these businesses in favor of transportation actually hindered Washington Park's growth. |
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