Earlier this year, wildfires ravaged Los Angeles for almost a month. And it got Bubbler Talk listener, Renee Kubesh, thinking: How have Milwaukee fires shaped the city? Where and how did the fires start?
We know Chicago is known for their great fire and that was 1871. The same year as the most devastating fire in Wisconsin’s history, the Peshtigo fire. The deadliest forest fire in U.S. history. But what about Milwaukee?
Well, the deadliest fire was the Newhall House Hotel Fire, which happened on January 10, 1883. That night over 70 people died in the hotel located on the corner of Broadway and Michigan streets. But that wasn’t the most destructive fire the city’s seen. That happened in the Third Ward, the same neighborhood where Kubesh and her husband, T.J. Morely, work at Eppstein Uhen Architects.
“We knew there was a fire here in the Third Ward at some point in the 1800s, that led us to think, what really came out of that fire?, asked Kubesh.”
The Great Third Ward Fire of 1892
October 28, 1892 was cool and dry. The local paper reported that there were also gale force winds, or wind exceeding 50 miles per hour.
“Today… we call the term ‘wind driven fires,’ which can wreak havoc on any type of fire that you have in a structure,” says Milwaukee Fire Department 4th Battalion Chief and secretary of Milwaukee’s Fire Historical Society, Dan Rode.
At 5:43 p.m. the call came in for a fire on Water Street and St. Paul Ave. It was a three story building called the Union Oil and Paint company. By the time firefighters arrived, 15 minutes later, there was a significant fire blazing.
Multiple engines showed up fighting the fire from the east, including Engine 10, an all-Irish crew which was just a few blocks away on Broadway Street. From the west, the department’s fire boat, the Cataract, doused the building from the Milwaukee river. After an hour, the fire was extinguished… at least, that’s what the men thought.
“So no sooner were they done with the Union Oil and Paint factory, then the furniture factory catches on fire,” Rode says.
The theory is that wind pushed hot embers from the first fire over a block away. Those embers ended up in the basement of Bob & Kipp furniture factory and burned up the elevator shaft, soon involving the entire building in flames.
“And as you can imagine, the furniture factory, what do they have? They have wood. They have sawdust,” Rode says. “All flammable solids that you have to deal with.”
The building was over 100-feet tall and 15,000 square feet in tota l— the equivalent to a quarter of a professional football field. All ablaze. Rode describes flaming embers the size of softballs flying all over the neighborhood. The neighborhood was mixed use at the time, both industry and residential.
At the time, the Third Ward was an Irish-immigrant stronghold, many living in wood-framed multi-family buildings on incredibly dense streets.
“Everything came by word of mouth,” Rode says. “So, as they realized that the fire was spreading, neighbors would take their possessions and they would move them out of the house into the street because they anticipated that their house would burn down.”
At 7:20 p.m., an hour and a half after the start of the fire, the blaze was spreading all over the Third Ward. The Journal Sentinel wrote, “It seemed as if a mountain of fire rolled across Broadway.”
“That’s when the all-call went out,” Rode says. “So you had resources come from Chicago and Oshkosh, Racine, Kenosha, Sheboygan.”
This is still the 1800s so there are no fire engines. Everything is horse drawn, which makes firefighting operations that much more taxing. It also meant that if you called for help you had to wait for those departments to travel by rail with their personnel and equipment. Meanwhile, the conflagration is still spreading.
It’s reported that the department desperately turned to an aggressive firefighting practice they had never used before: dynamite. Three kegs of dynamite were placed in a plant on Chicago Street hoping to create a fire break. When the fire reached the building, the dynamite went off, but the fire continued.
The fire continued to push east. Devouring commercial buildings. One after another. The National Distilling Company. Leidersdorf Tobacco company. Riedeburg and Bodden vinegar plant. All gone.
Around 10 p.m., Kenosha’s engine rolls in to cheers from onlookers. It’s estimated that 200,000 spectators filled the street to watch the destruction. It was said that if you were a Milwaukeean and you weren’t there then you were either disabled, an infant or in jail.
“The fire was visible as far north as Sheboygan and as far south as Waukegan, Illinois,” says Milwaukee County Historical Society Assistant Archivist, Michael Barrera. “Biggest fire in the city’s history.”
“By about midnight, you're about seven hours into this firefight, and these firefighters are just dog tired because they've been going nonstop,” Rode says. “It's like playing chess.”
Rode says the natural boundaries of the Third were an advantage. It was essentially contained from the river to the west and the lake from the east. But the wind was still whipping. If it started to push north, that’s the city’s young downtown, including city hall and the courthouse. And if the wind pushed west, that was home to the city’s industrial warehouses, some thousands of feet long. Unlimited fuel with no natural breaking points.
“And just by the grace of God, and the sheer width of the fire department in numbers, they were able to get the fire knocked down about 4 a.m. in the morning,” Rode says. “But by that time, as you can imagine, 20 square blocks have burned down.”
The devastation in the Third Ward
The Third Ward fire of 1892 took five lives, including two firefighters, which seems remarkable considering it leveled over 440 buildings, left 2,500 people homeless and caused an estimated $5 million in damages.
Pictures of the aftermath resemble war-zone like destruction. People who had lived in the neighborhood for 50 years couldn’t identify where on the block their homes had once stood. The neighborhood was gone, including the heart of Milwaukee’s Irish community.
“It changed the Third ward from a residential and commercial district to a warehousing and transportation district,” says historian and author, Carl Baehr. “Population just dried up.”
The city rallied around the people who lost their businesses and homes. Setting up committees to assist with housing, work and other benefits. It was a sort of city-wide mutual aid effort that some say planted the seeds to Milwaukee’s socialist future of entrusting local government. But Baehr says that as the city rebuilt the neighborhood, prejudice against the Irish population shaped how developers reimagined the Third Ward.
“There were still advertisements in the paper for jobs and said, no Irish need apply,” Baehr says. “They were seen as the lowest class of people.”
With the Irish displaced, some real estate developers saw this tragedy as an opportunity. All this land, ripe for industry, with direct access to rail and water, and now without the lowest class of people residing there.
New building codes went into place, like requiring buildings to be masonry, which both made the neighborhood safer and more expensive. The plan worked.
The Irish from the Third Ward eventually resettled to other Irish stronghold neighborhoods like Merrill Park and Tory Hill. But decades later, Tory Hill was destroyed for the Marquette Interchange.
“It’s essentially part of the freeway system now,” Michael Barrera says from the Milwaukee County Historical Society. “But Merrill Park really grew after that in terms of Irish Americans after the fire.”
The legacy of Milwaukee’s Great Fire
The Third Ward, Potawatomi land before the 1833 removal treaty, and Milwaukee, was forever changed after the fire of 1892. It pushed the fire department to expand and modernize, planting the seeds for the department’s first fire prevention bureau. It brought forth new building codes, which both made the neighborhood safer and more expensive. It displaced the Irish community and soon became a landing place for new Italian immigrants. The neighborhood completely dried up once more before gentrifying in the 1970s and 80s.
Bubbler Talk question-asker Renee Kubesh shares her takeaways from the historical fire.
“In the field of architecture, we're often seeing renaissance of ideas that may have been 20, 30, 50 years ago,” Kubesh says. “Things go in cycles, and I feel that the same has happened here in the Third Ward — there was housing, there was a community that was identifiable as Irish and had a certain history unto itself.”
Her husband, T.J. Morely agrees.
“What I found really fascinating was the original Irish community and… how they created new communities elsewhere in the city," Morley says. “And one of those communities was basically bulldozed for the freeway. And yet the Irish community in the city still endures. It's still recognizable. It has a presence in a big way.”
Milwaukee’s great fire doesn’t just tell the story of that night, it’s the story of the many past lives that each neighborhood has endured and the way people build off of tragedy. The Irish did it. The fire department did it, too. And so did the rest of Milwaukee.
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