Wisconsin Cities, Growth, and Change over Time

This section describes the typical patterns of growth and change over time that have shaped the geography of Wisconsin’s cities.  We look at the role of the natural landscape the city developed on, the growth of industry, the typical patterns of wealthy and working-class neighborhoods, and the influence of changing transportation systems.  Finally, a video tour through the east side of Madison is used to illustrate all of these points.

After going through the material on this page, you should be able to describe:

• The historical reasons why Wisconsin cities are located where they are
• How practices of land use within Wisconsin cities tended to reflect the geological landscapes on which they were built
• General tendencies–social, cultural, and economic–that were important in creating the forms of cities today

You should also be able to give a broad account of how cities in Wisconsin developed over time: who they were built for, and how you might “read” their history off the urban landscape.

The geography of a Wisconsin city can have many different dimensions. For example, we can look at how the growth of a city was influenced by its physical environment, and how the city’s development changed that environment. We can also study how the geography of the city has developed over time in response to the rise and decline of various industries, or how it has been influenced by changing transportation systems. This first set of slides and videos focuses on those dimensions of urban geography. The Historic Third Ward of Milwaukee, shown below, illustrates many of the concepts we’ll cover. This neighborhood was once an area of factories and warehouses in the swampy valley where the Menomonee and Milwaukee rivers meet, home to an Italian immigrant community. By the 1960s and 70s, industry and warehousing were moving to the suburbs and the residential part of the neighborhood was destroyed by freeway construction. More recently, however, the area has become the location of condominiums and high-end stores and restaurants catering to well-to-do professionals.

Urban geographers today more often emphasize the ways in which the geography of a city’s neighborhoods and public places reflects economic, social, and political inequalities, and we address some of those issues in a second set of slides and videos focused on Milwaukee. The changes in the Historic Third Ward illustrate some common themes here, as well. Political and business leaders in Milwaukee and many other cities have promoted this kind of redevelopment, making use of historic old industrial buildings to create an environment they hope will attract new economic activity to the central city–tech startups, for example. At the same time this kind of development has been criticized as doing little to alleviate either the poverty and unemployment in nearby neighborhoods, or the racial and ethnic divisions in the metropolitan area.

The first question we’ll ask is why cities are located where they are in Wisconsin. In many cases, part of the answer is obvious. Across the state, cities tend to be located either where there were natural harbors on Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, or along a major river. In the mid-1800s, both people and goods usually came to or left Wisconsin by ship on the Great Lakes, so cities grew up where ships could be unloaded. This was the case for Manitowoc, shown on this old postcard. As the postcard reveals, many of the early cities on the Lake Michigan shoreline hoped to become the main hub of trade from the eastern US, but this role was taken by Milwaukee, and even more so, Chicago. Instead, other industries besides shipping almost always came to dominate the local economy.

The city of Superior, in the northwest corner of Wisconsin, is one that actually did flourish mainly as a shipping center. The photo below was taken from Duluth, Minnesota, looking across part of the large harbor shared by Duluth and Superior. In the distance, the main landmarks visible in Superior are (A) grain elevators, where grain from the Midwest and Great Plains states is loaded on ships to be carried overseas, and (B) a huge pile of coal, which is brought by rail from mines in Wyoming and Montana and sent on from here by ship. Iron ore is also shipped from the Duluth-Superior harbor (recall the banded iron formation discussed earlier in this course).

Other Wisconsin cities grew up on major rivers, especially where there was a falls or rapids and the falling water could be used to power mills and factories. A good example is shown below, Beloit on the Rock River. Recall that sawmills were often built in this type of location, and later the paper industry developed in many of the same locations. In southern Wisconsin, only the earliest industries used water power, but that was the original reason for the city developing where it did.

Milwaukee was founded at a natural harbor on Lake Michigan, and the bird’s-eye view below shows the city at a time when a lot of its economic activity still revolved around shipping. However, Milwaukee’s later growth into a big city was much more related to the other important industries that developed there.

Milwaukee grew into a large city, above all because it became a major center for manufacturing machinery used in industry, agriculture, and transportation, as well as machine parts. These enormous gears were manufactured at the Falk Co., which specialized in parts for power transmission. They illustrate how much skill and experience in this kind of work could be found in Milwaukee when it was at its peak as a manufacturing center.

One of the best-known manufacturers in Milwaukee was Allis-Chalmers, which made farm tractors and a host of other kinds of machinery and employed thousands of workers.

International Harvester, one of the biggest agricultural equipment manufacturers, also had large operations in Milwaukee. The sign on this plant advertises tractors and cream separators made by this company, showing the connection between industry and dairy farming in Wisconsin.

By the early 1900s, Milwaukee became a major metropolis, with banks, newspapers, and other institutions supported mainly by the growth of manufacturing. Large numbers of German immigrants, often skilled workers, settled in Milwaukee in the later part of the 1800s. Their influence can be seen in the photo below, including the German-style city hall on the right and the sign on the Germania building stating that it was home to America’s largest German-language newspaper. Somewhat later, immigrants from other countries such as Poland, Italy, and Lithuania added to the city’s growth. In the 20th century, especially after World War II, many African-Americans moved to Milwaukee from southern states, and there was ongoing immigration, especially from Mexico. Young people from rural parts of Wisconsin often also moved to Milwaukee for at least part of their working careers.

Besides manufacturing, Milwaukee was famous for its beer, made in huge breweries like this one (now converted to condominiums). All of the major breweries were founded by German immigrants.

Smaller Wisconsin cities also grew through the development of manufacturing industry. For example, J.I. Case, a major farm and construction equipment maker, was based in Racine.

As automobile manufacturing became a major industry in the twentieth century, large auto plants were located in cities like Kenosha (shown below), Janesville, and Milwaukee. Heavy trucks are still built in Oshkosh.

Even relatively small cities were home to major manufacturing plants. Fairbanks-Morse, in Beloit, has made both locomotives and large diesel engines. Other examples include shipyards in Manitowoc, Sturgeon Bay, and Marinette, and the large John Deere plants in the small town of Horicon.

Now we can turn to the detailed patterns of growth and change over time that we see in large and small cities across Wisconsin. First, city growth occurred in stages, corresponding to the type of transportation that was available. From earliest to latest, these were:

1. The Walking City: In small cities of the 19th century, most people, even the wealthiest, lived only a short distance from work and could often walk there.
2. The Streetcar City: Streetcar lines were built in many cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The photo below shows a streetcar near the Capitol Square in Madison. By this time, city residents could travel from homes far out on the west or east sides of Madison to jobs downtown. With streetcars, even blue collar workers could live some distance from work. Middle-class professionals often moved out to streetcar suburbs, new developments on the fringe of the city, where they could buy more modern homes. Those streetcar suburbs have generally been incorporated into cities as they grew, and can often be recognized by blocks of houses in styles popular in the early 1900s, such as bungalows.
3. The Automobile City: As the twentieth century went on, first the well-to-do and then most other people could afford cars and began to use them to commute to work. This allowed wealthy residents to move far out into the suburbs, and new housing developments closer to the city were occupied by the middle-class. After World War II, even factory workers could afford to live in new developments and drive to work. This stage involved extensive expansion of cities and suburbs out into the surrounding countryside.

As cities grew, they also developed spatial patterns in which various parts of the city were occupied by distinctly different land uses and different types of residential neighborhoods. These patterns were often influenced by the original landscape the city was built on. However, they were also guided in many ways by local business and political leaders, using persuasion, city ordinances, influence over lending, etc. In the Walking City era, wealthy residents built mansions on high ground, often on a lakeshore if there was one available, but close to downtown businesses. Industry was noisy and produced air and water pollution, so city leaders wanted to see it confined to certain factory districts, often low-lying, swampy, and along rivers or major rail lines. Developers built cheap housing intended for blue collar workers near the factory districts. Middle-class neighborhoods were developed at a safe distance from industry, especially in the Streetcar City where new developments could be built at some distance from the central city. As cars came into widespread use, both residential areas and new industry could be distributed over large areas. However, there was still a distinction between lower-cost subdivisions, with more closely spaced small houses, and wealthy suburbs. The most recent changes include the widespread redevelopment of factory districts (like the Historic Third Ward of Milwaukee) and gentrification of lower-income older city neighborhoods. Entirely new housing developments are also being built to capture some of the look of older city neighborhoods (we’ll discuss a Madison example, later).

Let’s look at some examples of those patterns of city growth. In the middle foreground of this image from Google Earth, we see the downtown of Milwaukee, more or less the original center of the city in the mid-1800s. Just to the north is an area labeled Yankee Hill (circled). “Yankee” probably refers to well-to-do early settlers of the city from the northeastern U.S., who were prominent in business and politics. Notice that this area is near downtown but is removed from most early industrial sites, and sits on a bluff high above Lake Michigan. In other words, this is where we might expect to find a wealthy neighborhood early in the city’s history.

When we look at the same area in Street View, we find that indeed there still are some mansions from the nineteenth century preserved there, although a lot of the valuable real estate along the lakeshore is occupied by newer high rises.

The most important factory district in Milwaukee developed along the low, wet Menomonee Valley, still mostly industrial today. This was also the route followed by major rail lines and highways entering the city from the west. Here, far from downtown and wealthy neighborhoods along the lakefront, industries that produced noxious smells like tanneries were once common. North and south of the Menomonee Valley many blocks of low-cost housing were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, often occupied by factory workers. The Historic Third Ward was at the east end of the Menomonee Valley. Industrial districts also spread south along the lake shore, and north along the Milwaukee River that cuts through Downtown (most breweries were along the Milwaukee River). Later industrial development took place in older suburbs like Cudahy and West Allis.

Cudahy is small industrial city just south of Milwaukee. This view of part of Cudahy shows a common pattern in cities all over Wisconsin: A large industrial plant, with residential areas across the street that were mostly occupied by blue-collar workers, many of whom worked in the plant or other industry nearby.

The photo below shows the neighborhood across the street from the plant in the previous slide. The relatively small and closely spaced houses are typical of many other neighborhoods like this in cities across Wisconsin.

One more landmark in this pattern is the tavern, located conveniently across the street from the plant. The name of the bar below, Hammer Down, is probably a play on words, referring to the fact that this plant (the Ladish Co.) is a forge where machine parts are made by hammering steel.

Before leaving Cudahy, let’s zoom out and take note of another important part of the urban pattern (the area we just looked at is circled). Cudahy and many other Wisconsin cities not only have lots of industry, but also have excellent park systems. The park marked with an arrow includes a golf course and the local high school. Many of the parks, school buildings, and sewer systems of Wisconsin cities are a heritage from the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. At that time, leading politicians–mostly Republicans like governors Robert LaFollette and Francis McGovern–strongly believed that it was the role of government to improve cities through building and maintaining infrastructure, parks, schools, and health care systems. Milwaukee was somewhat different politically from the rest of the state, in that the Socialist Party often held the mayor’s office in the early 1900s. However, the Socialists actually had practical goals of improving the city that were very similar to those of the Progressive Republicans in other parts of the state, and were especially interested in building an outstanding park system.

By the early 1900s, streetcars and other transit systems allowed city residents to live far from work, even if they didn’t yet own cars. This neighborhood on Milwaukee’s south side was built mainly between 1910 and 1925. By that time, streetcar lines connected it with most other parts of the city; however, middle class families were also quickly acquiring cars, eventually making the streetcars obsolete

After World War II, economic growth and automobiles combined to allow great expansion of urban areas into the surrounding countryside. This air photo shows newly built developments on the west side of Madison in 1958. Today, most of the area shown is built up, except for a few areas like Eagle Heights Woods and Picnic Point, visible in the distance near Lake Mendota.

Finally, we’ll take a more detailed look at the growth of one particular urban area, the east side of the city of Madison. We’ll start with some background on the natural landscape, and then use a set of Google Earth placemarks that you can also explore on your own. Madison grew both east and west from a small area near the Capitol. We’ll focus on the east side because industry was located there, making it similar to most other Wisconsin cities. The political elite and University of Wisconsin leaders successfully opposed any development of industry west of the Capitol, to keep unsightly, polluting factories far from the university and the middle-class neighborhoods of the west side. East of the Capitol, industry was allowed to grow, a plan called the Madison Compromise. Even there, it was confined to a factory district that gradually expanded eastward. The photo below shows a early east side factory, the French Battery Company, later to become Ray-O-Vac, where flashlight batteries were manufactured. We’ll visit the site of the factory on our tour.

This shaded relief image of the topography shows the landscape in and around Madison. You should recognize many drumlins toward the east side of the map. Even in the isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, most of the hills are drumlins, though not as easily recognized.

Here we zoom in on the central part of Madison. The oldest neighborhoods of the city were around Capitol Hill and Mansion Hill to the north near Lake Mendota. Mansion Hill, as the name suggests, was where the wealthiest residents of Madison located their large homes, on a high point above the lake and close to businesses around the Capitol Square. Ridges stretched east from the Capitol area along the shores of Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, and large expensive homes were also built on those ridges as the city grew. Less expensive housing filled in the low areas, including parts of the large wetland in between the two ridges.

Low, wet areas east of the Capitol were designated as the factory district, with the oldest factories (making farm machinery) near the Capitol, and newer ones farther out to the east. Eventually, all of the wetlands were filled or drained and the whole isthmus was built up. After 1945, large areas east and north of the old factory district were developed into residential neighborhoods.

Now we’re ready to look at the Google Earth placemarks file that will guide you through a set of locations on Madison’s east side, illustrating typical patterns of city growth. This is the first of two videos that introduce those placemarks.

This is the second of two videos introducing the Madison placemarks. Now make sure to explore them on your own.