Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Think Again! It’s Great!
Milwaukee is my home town and I must admit, I’m very partial to the Cream City. In spite of being built on heavy industry, Milwaukee, like Chicago did not let its beautiful Lake Michigan lakefront to be totally surrendered to the almighty dollar. A series of adjacent parks (O’Donnell
One of the aspects that makes Milwaukee so unique is that for much of its historical development Milwaukee was guided by the Socialist leanings of its German heritage. The city is blessed with many beautiful landscaped parkways and a large park system that is a direct reflection of this Germanic concern for a beautiful built environment accessible to rich and poor alike.
North of the public lakefront parks has been the home of Milwaukee’s elite since the 19th Century and continues to be the center of Milwaukee’s social elite. Industrialists and Beer Barons built palatial homes along Milwaukee’s alpha street, Lake Drive. Think of Lake Drive as similar to Chicago’s famed Sheridan Road. As Milwaukee’s elite moved north along the lake, River Hills, a pastoral suburb with large lots became the favored destination. Although River Hills is not directly on the lake, it is the home to the only country club that matters to Milwaukee’s wealthiest families, the Milwaukee Country Club on Range Line Road.
I grew up in the middle class suburb of Wauwatosa on the west side of Milwaukee. During the fifties and sixties Wauwatosa was large suburb (56,000) singularly lacking in any minorities. My High-School (Wauwatosa East) was almost 100% non-Hispanic White. Talk about homogeneous!…. we had no Blacks, one Latino, and one Asian in a High-School of 1,300. Thirty years later, the community is still overwhelmingly non-Hispanic White, but there have been some minority inroads into the community. The city was 92.9% non-Hispanic White, 2.5% Black, 2.3% Asian and 1.8% Latino in the 2000 Census. Although the vast majority of Tosans are lower-middle class, there are some lovely upscale neighborhoods in the city. The most noteworthy is the Washington Highlands.
The Washington Highlands: Wauwatosa’s Gem
Map of Washington Highlands
View Larger Map of Washington Highlands
The Washington Highlands was one of America’s first themed planned subdivisions. “Before its development in 1916 the Highlands (as it is commonly called) was part of a parcel of rural property owned by Milwaukee brewer Captain Frederick Pabst. On the 200 acre farm, Pabst grew hops for brewing and bred large, fast trotting Percheron horses that pulled his beer wagons.
The property gradually became a rural oasis surrounded by development, and after Pabst’s death in 1904 his heirs decided to subdivide the residual 133 acre farm. They hired renowned German city plnner Werner Hegemann to design a model residential neighborhood for the site
Working with American landscape architect Elbert Peets, Hegemann create a plan using the advanced concepts of England’s new Garden City movement. The objectoive of the movement was to use an overall master plan to obtain thalthful, peaceful environment shielded form the intrusions of industrialization.
The Washington Highelands is considered a premier example of Garden City Planning. Laid out to minimize through-traffic, the curving streets meaner along the site’s naturally hilly topography. Numerous private parks help preserve the neighborhood’s rolling landscape, as do “split-grad” boulevards (in which on one of a roadway sits as much as 10 feet fighter than its sister lane).
From the beiginning , the Highland was home to both the professional and worker/tradesman. Hegemann’s pllned community proveided a central core of large lots to accomodate affluent Milwaukeans, as well as a perimeter of smaller lots for dwellings of more modest means. (Editors note: the perimeter working classes duplexes have been left out of the equation in the Higley 1000).
Buidling standards and design control governed lot size, structure design and placement. Nevertheless, the residential architectecture of theis beuatiful old neighborhood’s 350 plus homes is varied, and includes 14 styles popular during the 1920s and 1930s.” (Lynch & Lynch, 1993).
Today the Washington Highlands maintains its cache as the best neighborhood in Wauwatosa and the use of themed streets (Washington Circle, Martha Washington Drive, and Revere Drive) have become commonplace throughout the country. However, this was a novel idea in 1916 and the subdivision can be thought of as a truly unique neighborhood and design original.
The Washington Highlands was my childhood playground. My grandparents George and Helen Lindblom lived on Revere Avenue and there are no Higley 1000 neighborhoods that I know better than this one!
Milwaukee’s Aristocratic Retreat: Pine Lake (aka Chenequa)
Chenequa, Wisconsin clearly leads all other municipalities in the state according to 2005 Wisconsin state figures of mean adjusted income. Chenequa is a tiny incorporated village surrounding Pine Lake in suburban Waukesha County. Pine Lake was the favored “lake country” destination of Milwaukee’s elite in the early 20th Century and has followed the common historical path of transforming itself from a second home place to a first home place over the years. None-the-less, there were still 65 out of 283 homes vacant at the time of the 2000 Census. My assumption is that although a tiny number of them may have been for sale and thus empty, most were second homes. The village of Chenequa was incorporated in 1928 and has maintained a residential only policy since its inception.
Map of Chenequa and Oconomowoc Lake
View Larger Map of Chenequa and Oconomowoc Lake
The State of Wisconsin’s Revenue Department’s figures are different from the Higley 1000 list as my list is derived from the 2000 Census and the Wisconsin list is published annually from Wisconsin tax returns. The Wisconsin numbers are for 2006.
It is important to remember that (as detailed in “Methodology”) the mean household income statistics from the 2000 Census are not actual mean household income figures and have a tendency to play down great wealth by limiting the amount a household can claim to approximately $2,000,000 dollars. It appears that there is no statistical trickery in the Wisconsin Department of Revenue figures and that their figures include every personal taxpayer in a municipality. This is an important difference in accuracy for the two income statistics as only one in six households (those that receive the Federal Census “long form” ) is asked for income statistics in the decennial count.
The statistics below have two very interesting pieces of information. The Village of Chenequa has a average tax return figure of $825,409. Of course, this figure illustrates the great wealth found in this little village.
List of Wisconsin Department of Revenue per capita Income by Community (2006
- Chenequa $825,209
- River Hills 418,869
- Oconomowoc Lake 307,906
- Lac la Belle 172,854
- Bayside 157,959
- Meqon 153,859
- Fox Point 146,380
- Elm Grove 143,481
- Whitefish Bay 131.090
- Town of Delafield 127,338
Map of Indian Hills Estates
View Larger Map of Indian Hills Estates
Map of North Shore Cluster (East Side of Milwaukee to Mequon Waterfront)
View Larger Map of the North Shore Cluster
A few small wealthy suburbs did not make the Higley 1000 but are among the wealthiest places in Wisconsin including Madison’s two richest villages Maple Bluff and Shorewood Hills; Racine’s tiny North Bay and it’s larger Northern cousin Wind Point. Another small town that didn’t make the Higley 1000 is the small exclusive lake village in Waukesha County, Lac la Belle.
Two of the neighborhoods that I added to the Higley 1000 as “designated places”, Wauwatosa’s Washington Highlands (Higley1000: #881) and the East Side of Milwaukee (Higley1000: #813) are subsumed in much larger cities that are not normally associated great wealth outside of these specific neighborhoods.
Here is the list of Wisconsin’s wealthiest places (per tax return, 2005): (The statistics are for the entire city or village)
1. Chenequa (Milwaukee) $589,100
2. River Hills (Milwaukee) $358,218
3. Oconomowoc Lake (Milwaukee) $287,216
4. Maple Bluff (Madison) $210,182
5. Lac la Belle (Milwaukee) $178,667
6. Shorewood Hills (Madison) $150,191
7. Mequon (Milwaukee) $146,976
8. Elm Grove (Milwaukee) $141,086
9. North Bay (Racine) $140,562
10. Wind Point (Racine) $137,813
11. Fox Point (Milwaukee) $136,479
12. Bayside (Milwaukee) $136,313
13. Whitefish Bay (Milwaukee) $128,364
As for the racial make-up of these burgs, they are all almost exclusively Non-Hispanic White. Milwaukee, according to Massey’s Index of Dissimilarity (along with Detroit and Chicago) remains a rigidly segregated metro area. Asian’s and Hispanics were not found in significant numbers in the state of Wisconsin when the 2000 Census was taken. Although Milwaukee has a large Black population, African-Americans remain isolated and segregated from the suburban islands of affluence. The exception to this rule is an encouraging 8.1% of the households in Mequon’s Lac du Cours (Higley1000: #887) subdivision that are African-American. I recently had a chance to take a drive through this sub-division and it is a pleasant, if mundane collection of typical upper-middle class homes centered on a small man-made lake. The fact that the sub-division has a French nomenclature theme is unusual in America’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Curiously, the only other French themed sub-division in the Higley 1000 is found across the metro area in the Brookfield’s Parc du Chateau (Higley1000: #726). My guess is that the same Francophile builder was at work in these two nouveau riche upper-middle class towns. I have named the Brookfield Block Group that makes up this neighborhood Parc Du Chateau-Glen Kerry as they are the two largest sub-divisions in this Census area. This is the only French-Irish themed name in the Higley 1000!
