Like most Midwestern cities, Milwaukee is not blessed with an abundance of natural sled hills. “Flat to gently rolling” describes the region’s landscape with fair accuracy. There is, however, one location close to Downtown that offers sled runs steep enough to be exciting and short enough to be manageable: the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan.
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Those bluffs were heavily wooded at the dawn of urban settlement in the 1830s, but the trees gradually disappeared as a city emerged. The hill pictured here, at Lafayette Place, was one of the first to be cleared.
In 1888, when the Milwaukee River was literally an open sewer, the city tried to “solve” its pollution problem by digging a tunnel under the East Side and pumping fresh lake water into the putrid river. The city built an aptly named “flushing station” at the foot of the Lafayette Hill and installed what was then the largest water pump on earth.
The hillside was cleared during construction, and a modest pad of land around the station, improved with paths and plantings, represented a down payment on the magnificent lakefront parks of today. It’s not hard to imagine our ancestors screaming down the open bluff to the beach below on their vintage wooden toboggans.
This carefully lit scene was photographed in 1984, nearly a century after the flushing station opened. It shows Tammy Miller and her 3-year-old daughter, Shani, after a wet, heavy snow had draped the lakefront trees with ribbons of white.
The skyline behind them has changed significantly in the 40 years since they posed, but the solitary skyscraper, now the US Bank Center, is still the tallest building in Wisconsin. And that lakefront flushing station? It has also survived, but we know it today as Colectivo Coffee.
TAKE A CLOSER LOOK:
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Built as the First Wisconsin Center in 1973, the office tower today called US Bank Center rises 601 feet above Wisconsin Avenue.
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The Wisconsin Gas building (1930) is one of the city’s finest art deco structures.
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Most of this East Side lake bluff is as wooded today as it was before European settlement.
IN COLLABORATION WITH MILWAUKEE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
