Lisa Liljegren appreciates the details. She looks around and notices them. That’s what happened when she started working in downtown Milwaukee. She was spending time in the Plankinton Building at 161 W. Wisconsin Avenue, which used to be part of the Grand Avenue Mall.
Lisa noticed a four-leaf clover design repeated hundreds of times on the inside and outside of the building.
"It’s in the railings, it’s in the stone, it’s in — I think it’s called the cornerstones — where the elevators are, it is everywhere," Lisa says. "And so I’m just curious, what’s behind it?"
To try to answer that question, we have to go back more than 100 years, when this building was called the Plankinton Arcade.
A grand shopping arcade
John Plankinton was a prominent Milwaukeean who made his fortune in meat packing.
In 1867, he built a grand hotel in downtown Milwaukee. But in 1916, the hotel was torn down to make way for a two-story indoor shopping mall, the Plankinton Arcade. It was an innovative idea at the time, and even introduced Milwaukee to its first escalator. (The statue of John Plankinton that stood in his hotel was moved to the arcade.)
Julia Griffith is the program director for Historic Milwaukee. She says, the Plankinton Arcade had it all: more than 100 shops and an “amusements parlor” in the basement.
"It would have had, kind of everything — bowling alleys, they had a huge barbershop," Julia says. "They had a red room — actually Liberace played piano there, when he was a teen he would ditch school and come here."
Even though it’s hard to fathom, the Plankinton Arcade had 41 bowling alleys to be exact, a billiard parlor with 60 pool tables, and a Turkish bath in the basement.
Four leaves, or 'quatrefoil'
Julia is also an architectural historian. So of course, she too has noticed the clover design throughout the Plankinton Building.
"In architecture terms, we’d actually call it a quatrefoil," Julia says. "So four is the French word 'quatre' and 'foil' is the French word for leaf. So four-leaf clover."
She says it’s a shape that's been used in art and architecture throughout human history.
The architects of the Plankinton Arcade were Chicago-based Holabird and Roche. They were inspired by 15th-century Gothic Italian architecture.
"The goal of the building was to build an indoor shopping mall, so they drew inspiration from the arcade style of architecture which was very prominent in most of Europe," Julia says. "We see examples of it all over, but particularly in Italian versions."
Julia pulls out a picture of Italy’s oldest shopping arcade in Milan, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, built in the late 1800s. Like the Plankinton Arcade, it has a glass roof and a central rotunda. It’s also decorated with a version of the quatrefoil, or four-leaf clover.
"I would posit, having no ability to interview Holabird or Roche for they are both deceased, that they saw this motif, or somebody saw this motif, and thought 'Hmm, I like that, we should do something similar,'" says Julia.
She says the quatrefoil symbolizes lots of different things. In Christian religious architecture, it often refers to the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It can also symbolize the four seasons, eternity, and of course, good fortune.
Bubbler Talk question-asker Lisa Liljegren chimes in here.
"I thought this was going to be Irish conversation," says Lisa. "I thought, four-leaf clover was going to recognize our Irish heritage in some way, so this was very interesting to me."
It’s not an Irish influence, but an Italian one that inspired the designers of this ornate building.
After the arcade
Since its heyday in the early 1900s, the Plankinton Arcade has fallen in and out of use.
It was part of another indoor shopping mall development, called the Grand Avenue Mall, which opened in the early 1980s.
The mall adopted the four-leaf clover shape in the Plankinton Building as its logo. A 1982 promotional brochure reads: "Our logo is a symbol representing the spirit and elegance of a bygone era as well as the excitement and grandeur that will be The Grand Avenue."
But business at the mall declined in the 90s, partly due to competition from suburban malls.
It’s housed various organizations and businesses, including WUWM and the International Clown Hall of Fame in the early 2000s.
In the last decade, the building’s owners turned unused shops into apartments, some of which are called the Plankinton Clover Apartments — named after the four-leaf design.
The building still has a couple shops, including T.J. Maxx. Throughout those changes, a lot of the original architecture has remained intact, along with a statue of John Plankinton in the atrium. Lisa hopes more people will stop by.
"Maybe this conversation will help bring people back, and for them to remember what a special, unique building this is in Milwaukee," says Lisa.
And, keep an eye out for that quatrefoil shape. After you see it once, you might just start seeing it everywhere.
_
