Third Ward Fire

You're listening to Milwaukee Mafia, your weekly podcast dose of Wisconsin Mafia and true crime history. Hey everybody and welcome back to the Milwaukee Mafia podcast. This is our first episode. First story. I'm Eric Walterkens and I have Gavin Schmitt with me. And we're going to just jump right into the story. So Gavin, if you want to get started and I'll just chime in when I feel like it. Yeah, definitely, stop me at any point. So what we're gonna do for our very first episode is talk about something that's not the Mafia. How about that? Yeah that's great. This is the story of the Third Ward. We're gonna kind of set the stage. It's kind of more or less where the Summerfest grounds are, it's just south of the freeway, it goes through downtown. And you've got to imagine way back when Milwaukee was just being settled, this area of Milwaukee was all swampy. It was flat, it was not an area that the original settlers of Milwaukee wanted to live in. But they drained some land. Prospectors were building there, and the next big ethnic group to move in was the Irish. They started selling them lots of land. So the Irish are coming in. They're building their houses. They're building the warehouses. They're doing what they can do to make a home for themselves. John Gurda is probably the most famous historian. A quote, “It was filled in with Irish labor and covered with Irish housing as soon as the muck was dry” It'd also gained a reputation as the bloody third because apparently, the Irish were frequently drunk and engaged in fist fights. I don't know if this is true or this is what other people thought of them. It does sound like an Irish thing to do, right? Sorry to anybody out there that’s Irish, but stereotypes. There's gotta be a little bit of truth.

So originally the Third Ward of Milwaukee was settled by the Irish. They went through a few tragedies while they were living there. The first big one was way back in 1860. It was a steamship called the Lady Elgin. I don't know much about shipping and shipwrecks and I’m not sure a lot of people do. That's not really my thing, but maybe you're familiar with that. You may have heard of the Lady Elgin because it was a passenger ship that ended up sinking in the Great Lakes. 400 people died, most of them Irish. It is the second greatest loss of life on the Great Lakes. I don't know what the first is. Oh, will that come in later episodes? I don't know. You are looking at the wrong guy here. I don't know any. That was the first major tragedy. 400 Irish people lost in a shipwreck.

But the thing that we're here to talk about today is the Third Ward Fire, which is the other major thing. This is in 1892. So this fire breaks out about 5:30 in the evening, the building that it starts in is the Union Oil Company. Which as you can imagine, there's oil. Yeah, yeah. Not the place you want to have fire. So by sheer coincidence, there's already three other fires going on in the city. The fire engines are out there at these other fires so they don't get to Union Oil immediately. It takes them maybe 15 minutes to get there which is a long time, but it's oil burning. And you said this was an 1891? 1892. 1892. Do you know, I'm just curious, like, any idea how big was Milwaukee in 1892? I could not give you an exact population, but it's honestly not much. So, I'm assuming like three fires at one time, is a huge, would be a huge thing. You would assume it is a huge thing. I mean, in the 1890s Milwaukee would still be probably the biggest city in the state, but I mean, not by much, it would be comparable to Green Bay. So it's, it's not the Milwaukee we know today, it's still very much a growing city. So yeah, three fires at once. It'd become pretty busy. so yeah, these fires are going off and and the oil is burning and flames are shooting out, there's explosions going on because of the oil barrels. So these things are happening and, you know, they finally get to the fire. They think that they put out the fire so they're getting ready to go back home and no. The wind picks up the fire ends up jumping onto other buildings. Oh my God, you know? So the next door is on fire. It's a wholesale drug supplier that started burning down. Flames are shooting out. Smoke. The wind is blowing the smoke. You can see this from miles away and it is jumping again and again and again to more and more buildings and they say that at the peak, I don't know if this is true, but they say at the peak you could see it glowing in the sky as far away as Sheboygan or Waukegan. Wow, yeah. So it might be a little bit of exaggeration on the newspaper's part but definitely, I mean the biggest fire in Milwaukee history. And I guess we should probably preface this if somebody is listening that's not really familiar with Wisconsin. Sure, that directional being Waukegan would be, what, maybe an hour and a half away? Oh maybe, probably. Okay, well maybe an hour. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. But then Sheboygan was probably the same. You wanna let them know where? Yeah. So just to give you an idea of what kind of distance we're talking about, it’s a significant distance.

Clearly more buildings are burning, a lot of companies that no longer exist. Going further, it's 9:30. This is almost four hours later. It hits the Milwaukee Gas Company. Milwaukee Gas Company burst into flames and a lot of houses were on gas. At this point electricity really hadn't taken off. So when the Milwaukee gas companies are burning suddenly like now there's power outages throughout the city so even if you're not on fire, your power is going out. So it's affecting a lot of people. So, that's great. They do finally get it under control of course, as Milwaukee's not still burning, right? So they finally got it under control, it was estimated the total damage was four million dollars. That's four million at that time. It included the complete destruction of 215 railroad cars, 440 buildings, and somewhere between 1900 and 2500 people lost their houses. So it's 2500 Irish people who now have to find new homes. Luckily only five people died in all that. Wow, that's quite impressive actually. Yeah. Two firemen lost their lives. A third man lost his life when a building fell on top of him. And two women apparently had heart attacks. So you would think with all these, you know, 440 buildings, apparently people got out of it. That's good.

This was kind of like the event of the season. You know. You want to go see this fire so I imagine this is like a firework show. There's like, people sitting around watching the city burn. Yeah, this was in the newspapers. Maybe an exaggeration, but they said that pretty much the only people in the city who didn't come out to watch this were infants, because they're infants, they're not going to leave. And people in jail. They said if you weren't exactly in danger, you probably were sitting in your front yard watching this happen. This is crazy. Well you said there were a ton of houses burned down. Yeah. So that's just amazing. That they're so few deaths. Yeah. I don't really get it. I mean, that's a miracle or what? Yes apparently people got out. Okay, good.

So, now the obvious question for this is how does this all tie into the Mafia? Thank you. I know, right? Like I'm waiting for it, and it's just not coming. So now I got to ask the question. All right, so, what, and we're actually to that point in the story, so you ask at just the right time. Yeah. So the Irish of the Irish community are moving homes. They had either the choice to rebuild or to move, and the majority of them chose to move because rebuilding is just too expensive. New housing costs too much. There wasn't a lot of insurance. Now what happens is when they move out, this is now back how it was when the Irish moved in. You know, they moved in because it was the swampy, crappy part of town and now, it's, it's not swampy anymore. But it's burned down. In the 1890s, that's when the Italians start moving to the United States. So, the Italians who moved into Milwaukee ended up getting houses in the Third Ward again. So, the reason that the Italian community really settled in the Third Ward was because of this fire. So now today, if anybody thinks of the Italian community, they think of Third Ward. That's what the Italian Community Center is, but it was really, it was an Irish place originally, until the fire scared everyone out. So, that's what kind of caused this split from Irish to Italian, and they grew up there.

They started what was called Commission Row in the area that was on Broadway. Commission row is just a bunch of grocery businesses. They would like to go out in front of these warehouses with their produce, and stuff and sell it up. By 1915, the area had 29 Italian taverns, 45 Italian groceries, and an Italian bank. Two spaghetti factories, of course. So they did a pretty good job rebuilding it. You know, they really did. So yeah, this got to be a major Italian community. A kind of a funny little footnote is that the church they started there was the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii Catholic Church. It was commonly known as the “Little Pink Church”, that's what they called it. It was declared Milwaukee's very first architectural landmark that year. They made it a landmark in 1967, and then tore it down the very same year. The city came in and a lot of a lot of what was originally, I shouldn’t say original because the original burned down, but the original Italian Third Ward ended up getting torn out when they expanded and put in the 794 freeway. So then again, people got displaced and the Italians moved on to other neighborhoods, so today, a lot of this history doesn't even exist anymore. Yeah. It's a freaking highway. Yeah, some of it's still there. Some of the streets are still there but yeah, pretty much like none of the original houses are there anymore. And a lot of these warehouses have been converted to fancy condos. It's like once again it has become like this new neighborhood that's really nice this time. Yeah. The Third Ward is, I mean, it's a trendy neighborhood.

What is in the Third Ward now? Is there something that would be there that I would know? Chicago Avenue sounds familiar, but I'm trying to think where that is. Yeah I don't know what would stand out. It's kind of by the Summerfest grounds. Yeah. So if you're on 794, you get off on Michigan Avenue to go to Summerfest. That's basically that's where you are. Okay. I don't know what you would go to the Third Ward specifically for. Like, I mean, if you didn't live there. So, I don't know.

So what other questions do you have? Well, okay, so I mean, I guess I can ask a lot of questions but I'm afraid that they're gonna digress into something you might be covering. Yeah, but I guess questions too big we’ll just table until later. Okay. So, you've got this community. The Italian community comes in, starts settling in this area. I'm assuming that all these people that came here were all these Italians, but were not from the Mafia. No, we should basically be very clear early on. So 99% are perfectly fine people. So is it another episode where we learn what created the mafia? Like, who settles here becomes the Mafia, or how these Italians start to develop this? Like, you know, speak a little bit to that? Let's save that one a little bit. I really just want to kind of get the beginning settled in, which, you know, like you thought like right away, “Where is this going?” There was a reason I wanted to start here. But yeah, let's not get into that. Let’s keep this separate for now. Okay, we're gonna save that. Bad question. I don't know, it’s just for future episodes. So I don't really think I have any other questions at this point in time, okay? Okay.

Submit a question, we will happily address them at the beginning of our next - well we can't address them at the next episode because we’ll be done by the time the beginning of the next episode is recorded. Yeah. But submit them, and we will address them at any point in the future.

Gavin, hit them with the contact info, again, that would be great. Absolutely. So yeah, if you have questions about this or really anything at all about Milwaukee crime, history of Milwaukee, Italians in Milwaukee, anything like that, Feel free to send email.