Washington Highlands Historic District

About this property

The Washington Highlands Historic District is a historic subdivision in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, planned by Hegemann & Peets starting in 1916. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. The Washington Highlands has a rich history and is known for its large, unique, and stately homes. The Historic District is bordered by 68th Street, 60th Street, Milwaukee Avenue, and Lloyd Street. The land the district now sits on was once owned by Frederick Pabst, the founder of Pabst Brewing Company. After Pabst's death, the land was platted for subdivisions. In 1916, Werner Hegemann and his firm designed the neighborhood that would become the district. Influenced by the garden city movement, their design preserved natural features like Schoonmaker Creek and parklands, and emphasized the natural terrain with curving streets. The neighborhood was the first in the Milwaukee area to adopt formal racial covenant exclusionary restrictions enforcing white-only residences. In 1919, the subdivision imposed the covenant that cited "at no time shall the land included in Washington Highlands or any part thereof, or any building thereon be purchased, owned, leased or occupied by any person other than of white race." Exceptions were possible for domestic servants. Further, financial institutions further aligned this segregation through redlining following guidelines of the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) which designated the new subdivision as green or “Grade A” as a “highly restricted and exclusive area,” which prevented Black and other non-white applicants from being approved for home loans in the area. The federal government justified these rules enforcing segregation, which were enacted nationally, as protecting property values and reducing “credit risk” from the “infiltration of inharmonious racial groups.” A HOLC brochure in the period noted Washington Highlands “permits a wide latitude of discrimination in accepting residents,” which was considered an attractive feature. These restrictions remained in place until it was made illegal by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was supported locally by the 1967-1968 Open Housing housing marches led by the Milwaukee chapter of NAACP Youth Council, Vel R. Phillips, and James Groppi. However, the legacy of these practices continue to the present, as the neighborhood’s demographics have remained fairly consistently homogenous, with 87% of residents being white as of 2020 US Census. The broader metropolitan area consistently ranks as one of the most racially-segregated in the United States.

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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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