Cream City Chronicles by John Gurda

Author:John Gurda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2013-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Milkwaukee Auditorium, 1909

If These Halls Could Talk

Milwaukee Auditorium Was City’s Parlor

Milwaukee suffers from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to entertainment venues. The Marcus Center, the Pabst Theater, the Bradley Center, the Arena, and the Milwaukee Theatre are practically neighbors in downtown Milwaukee. At the height of the season, when State Street is filled with pedestrians in a hurry, you can’t tell if they’re rushing to a Bucks game, a ballet performance, or a Broadway show.

We’ve come to take this variety for granted, but it wasn’t always so. Until the mid-1900s, the Milwaukee Auditorium— forerunner of the Milwaukee Theatre—was the city’s only central gathering space. It served as Milwaukee’s front room, the communal parlor we gussied up to entertain out-of-town guests and receive special visitors.

The building was busy from the day it opened in 1909. In its first full year of operation, the Auditorium hosted 188 meetings, 57 trade shows, 44 concerts and dances, 35 conventions, 13 lectures, and 8 circuses. With typical Milwaukee modesty, the building’s managers claimed only that it was the “best lighted and ventilated hall in the country.”

By the early 1920s, after some judicious improvements, Milwaukee was ready to crow with the biggest of cities. An elaborate brochure described the Auditorium as “The Nation’s Meeting Place” in “America’s Best-Equipped Convention City.” Hyperbole aside, the building was the scene of some red-letter events. In 1916, with war raging in Europe, local Germans staged a week-long “charity war bazaar” in the Auditorium to help the subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm. Its raffles, food booths, concerts, beer garden, and displays raised more than $100,000 “for the relief of war sufferers” in the Fatherland.

One year later, such an event would have seemed positively treasonous. America entered World War I on the Allied side in 1917, and Auditorium gatherings took a decidedly patriotic turn. In 1918, the United Slavs, a group headed by the city’s Poles, drew 20,000 to a rally supporting the policies of President Woodrow Wilson, who had made Polish independence one of the war’s objectives.

With victory secured in November 1918 (an event celebrated at the Auditorium), Milwaukee turned to less momentous concerns. As the 1920s roared into high gear, the Auditorium was the scene of elaborate trade shows promoting radios, automobiles, and such home improvements as “dripless” electric refrigerators.

There were less salutary gatherings. The Ku Klux Klan rode a wave of intolerance to new heights in the wake of World War I, and Northern cities became its particular strongholds. In 1922, nearly 3,000 Klansmen converged on the Auditorium to hear a message of hatred directed against Jews, Catholics, African Americans, and immigrants from anywhere.

The building was quieter during the depressed 1930s, but it remained Milwaukee’s place for civic celebrations. One of the most spirited marked the end of Prohibition in 1933. Nearly 15,000 people jammed the Auditorium for an old-fashioned “Volksfest” featuring sauerkraut, frankfurters and, for the first time since 1919, legal beer.

War clouds soon returned and, once again, not every Milwaukeean was on the right side. In 1935, the Friends of New Germany staged an Auditorium rally in support of Adolf Hitler.

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