As Marquette University research fellow John Johnson biked around Milwaukee last year, it didn’t take long for the architecture buff to notice something about the city’s houses.
“I was recognizing patterns, but they weren’t patterns that corresponded to north side, south side, east side,” Johnson said.
So Johnson turned to a database from the City Assessor’s Office, which attempts to assign an architectural style to each of Milwaukee's roughly 130,000 residential homes. When he mapped the data, he found that the city’s homes formed a stunning pattern of concentric circles around the center of the city, like rings in the trunk of a tree.
“Each layer preserves a distinctive swathe of homes, bearing witness to the way a generation of Milwaukeeans lived and worked,” Johnson said.
Upon closer inspection, Milwaukee’s housing patterns reflect not only aesthetic trends but also how historical events like immigration, war and civil rights shaped the city.
Architectural historian and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor emeritus Thomas Hubka spent his career categorizing everyday residential houses into different styles. It’s difficult, painstaking work: Architects have traditionally focused more on documenting the houses of the elite and wealthy rather than the homes of common folk.
According to Hubka, many people who attempt to categorize everyday homes also overemphasize the exterior characteristics rather than the internal layout. But the city assessor makes attempts to merge these two elements, which deserves “big applause,” he said.
“Every house is important,” Hubka said. “There’s a dignity in every home. And they each have a story to tell.”
Between 1890 and 1900, German and Polish immigrants built scores of modest workers cottages and old style duplexes in Riverwest and the near South Side.
Many later raised up their cottages to add half-basement units below — a thrifty way to get an extra housing unit into an already-thrifty house. The city calls these cottage duplexes, but they are better known as "Polish flats."
The crowded conditions, dim lighting and poor sanitation in these basement units served as a rallying point for the progressive movement in Milwaukee, which has the longest history of Socialist mayors in the country. The movement, with its focus on quality basic city services, even had a nickname: "sewer socialism."
From 1900 to 1910, old style duplexes and cottages continued to expand throughout the city. "Duplexes in particular are very Milwaukee," said Chris Hillard, a legislative research analyst by trade and architecture buff by heart. Today, more than one-fifth of the city's housing stock consists of duplexes. "I couldn't find any other cities that come close to that," Hillard said.