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

Racial Change at St. Elizabeth’s

by Editor

by Tom Tolan – Part 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.

Posted inNeighbor Spotlight

Jesse Windom

by Editor

by Jim Hendersen

Over the past eight years, Jesse Windom has taken five rundown, former slumlord properties and turned them into livable, comfortable shelters for the homeless, mentally handicapped and onetime criminal offenders. He could now be called, respectfully and legitimately, a “shelterlord.”

Posted inColumns

Group Efforts

by Mark Lawson

Recently in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel there was a lengthy article about Milwaukee’s collaborative visual arts groups. In part, this article was a response to a Jan. 19 article in the New York Times, “Doing Their Own Thing,” which identified Milwaukee as one city where artists made their own art scene through collaborative efforts.

Posted inUncategorized

Polish Town

by Editor

Excerpt from Chapter 2 of Riverwest: A Community History
by Tom Tolan

Part 2 of 6 in a series.

It is 4:30 a.m. on what will be a warm Friday in early autumn, 1920. Fourteen-year-old Clem Doberneck is one of the first in the neighborhood to rise. He eats breakfast with his father, who must catch an early streetcar to his job at the Miller Brewery, and by 5 a.m. is out of his family’s Booth Street house, beginning his morning rounds. From Locust Street to Reservoir Avenue, between Richards Street and the river, he walks from streetlight to streetlight, turning off the gas. Gradually, the sky becomes lighter….