East Brady Street Historic District

About this property

The East Brady Street Historic District is located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. In the 1870s, the district emerged as an enclave of Polish working-class immigrants living in the surrounding neighborhood. Starting in the 1930s it also attracted many Italian immigrants and eventually became known as Little Italy. St. Hedwig's, built in 1886, is located at the center of the district. A longtime Italian grocery and Italian bakery are still mainstays of the neighborhood. The western end of Brady Street leads to the 2004 Brady Street Bus Shelter, 2006 Marsupial Bridge and Media Garden, and 2012 Trestle Deck—infrastructure and public space projects designed by LA DALLMAN, the architecture practice of Grace La and James Dallman. The urban transformation was honored with the Rudy Bruner Award Silver Medal and numerous other design awards including the American Institute of Architects Honor Award. The house at 826 East Brady Street is a simple worker's cottage, probably built in the 1870s, and typical for that period. The Sikorsky Saloon at 1200-1204 E. Brady Street is a 2-story cream brick building with Italianate-styled hood moulds over the windows, built about 1875. It had three storefronts at street level and living quarters above. The Joseph Polczynski Tavern at 1701-1703 N. Arlington is a 2.5-story cream brick building with simple Italianate styling. It was a wooden building when it was moved in 1872 to N. Franklin and East Brady, where it served as St. Hedwig's School. In 1879 St. Hedwig's had outgrown it and it was raffled off and moved to the current location, where Joe Polczynski encased it in a veneer of cream brick and ran a saloon there. The J. Kunitzky Block at 1673-77 N Farwell Avenue is a 3-story cream brick business block - an early major commercial building. It was designed by H.C. Koch in High Victorian Italianate style with brick hood moulds over the windows and a cornice of wood and sheet metal. Originally John Kunitzky ran a saloon on the first floor, and lived on the second. The third floor held a meeting hall. The John Sonnenberg duplex at 1235-37 E. Brady Street is a 2.5-story duplex built in 1881. The massing, fish-scaled shingles in the gable ends, and the fretwork above the porches are all Queen Anne touches. Sonnenberg was a grocer. The McLaughlin building at 1687-89 North Franklin Place is a 2.5-story brick saloon built in 1883 for John P. McLaughlin. It lays a small Queen Anne-style gable end (complete with shingles) over a boomtown facade in an unusual way. Theodore Wnuk ran the saloon from 1884 for many years.

Location

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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