Justin Miller’s favorite church wasn’t even on his list of buildings to visit.
But as he was wrapping up a long day of surveying religious buildings in Milwaukee last January, he looked across the road from the church he’d just photographed and spied a stone peak bearing a cross that he had never seen before. Curious, Miller walked a few blocks to find the building it belonged to.
It was the Living Waters Church of God in Christ, and it looked like a dollhouse-sized gothic cathedral.
“It had these incredible vertical buttresses on the side, and it has this soaring quality to it, but it’s tiny. It’s built on two bungalow-sized city lots. The whole thing less than 60 feet wide,” Miller recalled, smiling. Inside was just as breathtaking: “It has the most incredible stained-glass windows, I would say, of any church in the city.”
That’s just one of the more than 250 places of worship that Miller found during his survey of Milwaukee’s religious buildings as part of an effort to identify candidates for the National Register of Historic Places.
This past year, the UWM Cultural Resources Management (CRM) program, the City of Milwaukee’s Historic Preservation Commission, and the Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Office teamed up to conduct a survey of the city’s religious buildings – its churches, synagogues, mosques, and more – built between 1920 and 1980.
That project is important because it’s identified buildings that are significant enough – either architecturally or historically – to be considered for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, or to receive local historical designation. That comes with tax benefits for some of the buildings, according to a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article.
But perhaps more importantly, the project gives city leaders a deeper understanding of the religious communities that call Milwaukee home.
“The religious buildings, historically, are built so well. They are such icons in their neighborhoods,” said Miller. “(Now) the City will have them on its radar to be able to start connecting with them in terms of funding opportunities to help keep the building up, which affects property values, which affects community and neighborhood identity.”
Laying the groundwork
The parameters of the project were simple: Count, research, and photograph every religious building in Milwaukee constructed between 1920 and 1980.
The Cultural Resource Management program at UWM is ideal to take on such a task. The program provides consulting services to help its clients comply with historic preservation regulations, both on archaeological sites and for architectural-historical resources. Miller is an architectural historian with the CRM program.
To begin, Miller and his colleagues had to dig through city archives to begin pinpointing locations of each building. They wanted buildings that were constructed with a religious purpose in mind, which meant they had to discount buildings that were built for another purpose previously and were later converted to houses of worship.
Similarly, they also had to count buildings that had been constructed as churches or synagogues that were later converted to a different use. For example, UWM’s Helene Zelazo Center began life as the synagogue of the Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun.
Then Miller had to visit those buildings. He and his colleagues, Kelly Blaubach and Megan Daniels, spent several days in their cars, driving around the city in search of the buildings. Miller went out on further excursions with Daina Penkiunas, the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Historic Preservation Officer. They took photographs, talked with the buildings’ occupants, and learned more about their histories.
Using that information, he and his colleagues at the CRM program began to winnow down their enormous list (Miller describes the process as a sort of March Madness bracket-style process of elimination) until they had a short list of 75 buildings that they thought might be good candidates for historic registers.
“For the National Historic Register, a building can be significant because of historical events that were associated with it. It can be important because of archaeological potential, or it can be significant because of architectural or engineering qualities,” Miller explained. “For most of these, we were looking at architectural qualities.”
Then came the hard part: Getting the other organizations to agree about their choices. UWM’s team worked with Tim Askin, a senior planner at Milwaukee’s Historic Preservation Commission, to settle on a final list for Penkiunas to approve.
“It sometimes felt a little bit like legal negotiations,” Miller joked. “There might be a property that her office didn’t feel quite made it, and either me or one of my colleagues was like, no! We’re going to fight for this building to get on the list.”
Eventually, all three groups agreed on 38 buildings that they felt were “slam dunks” to be added to the National Register. That’s just the first step, however; it’s up to the building’s owners to pursue obtaining a listing on the Register or a local designation. Miller said that there have been several congregations that have reached out to the City about National Register listing, and there may be others as congegations read the survey’s report and consider whether the historical designation is something that interests them.
A very pious city
Miller uncovered some fun and interesting facts as he worked on the project, starting with the sheer number of religious buildings in Milwaukee. By Miller’s calculations, the city has about the fourth-highest ratio in the nation of churches to people in the country.
“It turns out that Milwaukee has one house of worship for about every 700 people,” he said.
Miller suspects that’s largely thanks to Milwaukee’s history as a city of immigrants.
“You have all of these different congregations coming from Poland and Germany and Italy and Ireland, and each little community has to build their own church,” he said. “Because it’s a symbol of a community, of a neighborhood. And so you end up with literally hundreds of churches all over the city.”
And over half of those churches were Lutheran, he noted, thanks to an influx of German and Scandinavian immigrants.
Today, those churches are indelible marks on the neighborhoods around them.
“There are neighborhoods where if you can hear the bells of a certain church, you’re part of that neighborhood,” Miller mused. “They’re a sense of pride for neighborhoods. I think religious buildings are evocative in a way that some other buildings aren’t, because they represent the aspirations of the congregations that built them.”
Even if someone isn’t religious, he said, you can still feel the love that worshippers poured into their houses of worship.
That’s part of what CRM at UWM is about, he added.
“We’re able to do things we hope benefit the community or that will lead to real world good. We’re able to share our knowledge and expertise to help communities … recognize and celebrate their historic resources,” Miller said.
There is more work ahead; during the course of the survey, Miller was introduced to the work of Alonzo Robinson, Jr., the first Black licensed architect in the state of Wisconsin. UWM-CRM was recently awarded a grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to study and document Robinson’s work.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science