Posted inRNA News

RNA Bylaws

FROM: Shawn Smart, RNA Co-Chair =============================== Neighbors: Attached is the final draft in content of our bylaws approved on March 11, 2003. Editors able to detect and correct glaring grammer and spelling errors appreciated. Voting privileges, election of officers; creation of a board were controversial issues. I suggest to neighbors in disagreement with the final […]

Posted inRNA News

RNA Minutes

Turning transformer boxes into public art – Biopak building proposals – Gentrification Position Paper debated and approved – RNA affiliates with Citizens Allied for Sane Highways (CASH) – Annual Spring Cleanup plans – RNA bylaws approved

Posted inRNA News

Full RNA Gentrification Position Paper

(This is an evolving document with this version approved in principal at the Development Committee meeting on January 11, 2003.) The natural environment, plus the diversity of its people, businesses and buildings makes Riverwest unique in Milwaukee. Our neighborhood has been discovered in recent years by a new group of investors and people with a […]

Posted inUncategorized

The Largest “Vacant Lot” in Riverwest

by Peter Schmidtke

The wind gusts stronger along Bremen Street, past the Riverwest Tavern on Auer Avenue. That’s because it knows it has three acres to gather steam. It’s not a UFO landing field, but it might as well be. A chain-linked fence with prickly barbed wire rings the perimeter, and a dozen or more padlocked monitoring wells protrude from stubbly yellow grass like rusty periscopes from stalled submarines.

Posted inBlack History, Harambee Connection, Politics, Riverwest History, Telling Our Stories

Racial Change at St. Elizabeth’s

by Tom TolanPart 3 of 6 in a series

In the early 1960s, St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church — now St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church, at 128 W. Burleigh — was a relatively thriving parish, with a school attended by more than 1,000 children. Most parishioners were of German ancestry — many descended from “St. E’s” founders — or Polish families who had migrated from the east side of Holton. African-Americans were a definite presence, but they were less numerous in the parish than in the neighborhood. Fewer than 10 percent of the 1,056 pupils at St. Elizabeth’s in 1963 were black, and most of their families could be classified as middle-class.