North Grant Boulevard Historic District

About this property

The North Grant Boulevard Historic District is a neighborhood of stylish houses built on large lots from 1913 to 1931 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. Charles James was the English immigrant who built Milwaukee's first frame store and a home and warehouse for Solomon Juneau. In 1839 he bought the 160-acre parcel which now holds the district and built a prominent farm there, with his house and the surrounding five acres framed in a horseshoe of evergreen trees. He called his farm "The Cedars," and it was noted for growing 200 varieties of roses, tulips, peonies, apples, potatoes and wild plums. By 1890 Milwaukee's city limits had reached Charles James' farm. The growing city was developing parks for its citizens, and bought the land that is now Sherman Park to the north for that purpose. With that promise, real estate brokers Julius Wechselberg, a former member of the Wisconsin State Senate, and his brother Ludwig bought 100 acres of James' farm for residential development between 1890 and 1896. In 1896 Ludwig, Henry C. Paine, and Benjamin Weil incorporated the Boulevard Park Land Company, but not much happened there for years, perhaps because the land was still out of town, not served by public transport. Finally in 1909 the company bought the last bit of James' farm and began to plat the parcels for development. The company's target was high-class buyers, so it platted the land in rather large lots 50 feet wide and from 120 to 165 feet deep. The company also asked the city to officially designate Grant street a "boulevard," which gave it prestige by limiting its use by wagons, trucks and sleighs. Until then Milwaukee had typically granted this designation to broad streets linking parks with the two roadways separated by a landscaped median. Grant would be broad, but it did not link parks, and instead of the median down the middle, it would have a single roadway down the center, with a broad landscaped strip down each side. The boulevard designation was finally granted in 1917. Deed restrictions within the neighborhood required single-family homes, required that they have a minimum value of $3,500 initially, and required that houses be set back about 80 feet from the street to give an estate-like feel. Deed restrictions also forbade the sale of alcohol, livery stables, and "any business that would be detrimental to the interests of a first class residential neighborhood." The Walter J. Buckley house at 2370 N. Grant Boulevard is a 2.5-story English-influenced Arts and Crafts-style house designed by Charles Valentine and built in 1913, stucco-clad on a brick base with some half-timbering. Buckley was secretary-treasurer of the T.L. Smith Co., which built concrete-mixing and stone-crushing equipment. Walter Mockler bought the house in 1918; he was vice-president of the A. George Schulz Co., which made paper boxes. Erving Koester, a lawyer, bought the house in 1923 and lived there into the 1970s.

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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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