| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office.
This five-story brick building is designed in the Renaissance Revival style with a terra cotta trim and a stone first floor. It has retained its original first floor configuration and mill constructed wooden posts. Large double-arched pavilions appear at each corner; and foliate capitals crown elongated two-story pilasters. Triangular pediments are placed over some of the double-hung windows. This building is one of the finest designs in the district.
A century ago, the Third Ward bustled as the heart of Milwaukee's wholesale business. Though quieter a century later, it still boasts the state's largest surviving cluster of turn-of-the-century warehouses. Blocks filled with looming, flat-roofed brick structures, many abutting each other and pushing to the sidewalk, give the district a dense, urban appearance. The brick canyons display an impressive variety of terracotta, metal, and stone ornamentation, and various architectural motifs.
The Third Ward became the city’s leading factory and warehouse district by the late nineteenth century due to its strategic location. Central to the river, rail access, the harbor, and downtown commerce, traders distributed goods to residents of Milwaukee, the rural areas of Wisconsin, and lands beyond. The district’s railroad, warehouse, and factory workers were mostly Irish immigrants who lived in hundreds of tiny frame cottages huddled on the marshy lakeshore to the east.
In October 1892, fire in an oil warehouse spread out of control and laid waste to over four hundred structures. Almost two thousand Irish laborers and their families lost their homes. The rubble was bulldozed, followed by major rebuilding. By 1900, large dark-brick warehouses replaced smaller cream-brick Italianate warehouses, Italian warehousemen supplanted the Irish residents, and the Third Ward re-emerged as Milwaukee’s busiest wholesale and light-manufacturing district. The concentrated rebuilding created a cohesive architectural character, maintained in recent years by exterior renovations and new construction.
As warehousing moved to the suburbs, many buildings' upper stories became vacant, but retained many grocery commission houses, small manufacturing, distribution, and retail firms, and recently a growing mix of specialty retail shops, loft apartments, and entertainment venues. Among the district’s more than seventy structures are outstanding examples of the Neoclassical, Romanesque Revival, High Victorian Gothic, and Queen Anne styles.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE:
This imposing building was constructed in 1895 for Landauer & Co., a wholesale dry goods and notions firm established in 1869. By 1881 they employed 37 salesmen who operated in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan, and had an $875,000 annual trade.
Landauer & Co. conducted business at this address from 1895 to c. 1927. Universal Furniture Mart has been at this site since c. 1927. (A).
Fine brick Commercial Style building. A variety of window treatments is unified by symmetrical fenestration and arcades. Significant structure in what is called the Lower Third Ward warehouse district.
No original building permit.
In 1994 the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design renovated the upper floors for student housing. |
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