On Saturday June 28 the Bay View Historical Society will designate Milwaukee’s Humboldt Park as its historic landmark for 2025. The honorary designation will be the nonprofit’s 30th site.
Today, Humboldt Park is home to Chill On The Hill, The Vine beer garden, fishing in the lagoon and various community events. Ahead of the ceremony, Lake Effect's Audrey Nowakowski met with Bay View Historian and Author Ron Winkler to learn more about the history of the park.
The early days of Humboldt Park
In 1890, Milwaukee's Parks Commission purchased 45 acres from two wealthy Bay View families — Henry and Mathilda Mann & Jane Wilcox. Logan and Howell Avenue marked the new park's east-to-west boundary, with Idaho Street and Oklahoma Avenue to the north and south.
Originally known as South Park, Humboldt Park was renamed in 1900, after the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt — often considered "the father of ecology" and environmentalism.
"He was quite a renaissance man," says Winkler. "We was kind of like Wisconsin's Increase Lapham, but on a much larger scale."
The city commissioned South Park alongside five others — today's Kosciuszko, Sherman, Washington, Riverside and Mitchell Parks.
"They were in fact created by the City of Milwaukee, because there were no free public gathering places," Winkler says. "There were beer gardens, but the beer gardens charged, so the city wanted to provide something for all of the citizens."
In 1893, the city added a man-made lagoon adjacent to the nearby creek, an artificial island and a boathouse with rentable rowboats.
In 1910, the boathouse was replaced with a two-story pavilion — complete with concessions, a warming room for winter ice skating and even a bridge to the man-made island.
The years following World War I saw a northward expansion of the park to its current 71 acres in 1920 and the addition of a memorial for fallen soldiers in 1921.
Humboldt Park in the New Deal era & beyond
During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) launched various projects, including the construction of a farmhouse-style pavilion that stands to this day. The building, known as the Field House, was designed by Clas and Clas in 1932 and replaced the old service and maintenance building across from the lagoon. The building was remodeled in 1961 into today's Humboldt Park pavilion.
"If we look at the top of that building, we can see that there's a weathervane, which is a nod to the WPA workers who built it," Winkler says. "They intentionally included that, and it shows a worker with a wheelbarrow."
During the same time as its sibling bandshell in Washington Park, the WPA also added an Art Deco bandshell in 1932 in Humboldt Park. Located at the foot of the hill, the bandshell was optimally situated to host crowds of up to 2,000 people.
"The inside was so reflective that they didn't need any [additional] lighting, because the lighting from inside projected out to the seating for the audience and there's a gradual slope appeal."
For decades, the bandshell hosted a wide variety of live performances until it was burnt down by arsonists in 1976. It was rebuilt in 1977 and stands to this day as the home of Chill On The Hill.
The third WPA project in Humboldt Park was upgrading the creek that removed the lagoon’s overflow. A rustic bridge and small waterfall was built at its outlet, along with a series of fieldstone bridges and waterfalls along the brook.
Humboldt Park today
Today, Humboldt Park is home to a wide variety of playgrounds, walking paths, fishing and community events. Located in the heart of Bay View, Winkler says Humboldt Park illustrates the importance of access to nature within an urban setting.
"Having these green spaces in cities is very beneficial for body, mind and spirit," he says. "And in fact, the temperature is about 10° cooler when you have these green spaces and it just helps everybody's psyche."
The Bay View Historical Society's Humboldt Park Landmarking Ceremony will be held at the pavilion in the park on Saturday, June 28 at 1 p.m. It's free and open to the public.
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