George Zagel may be the most prolific architect you’ve never heard of.
He designed apartment buildings, duplexes, single-family homes, and rows of stores in Wauwatosa, Whitefish Bay, Shorewood, Sherman Park and Milwaukee’s East Side.
“Zagel is the face of Milwaukee,” says Susan Wirth, who has spent the past 25 years working on a monograph about Zagel for the State Historical Society.
Many of Zagel’s buildings are in the Mediterranean Revival style, with tiled roofs, arched windows, iron grillwork and balconies, and are often marked by decorative stone corner blocks. One of Wisconsin’s first registered architects, Zagel designed buildings that include those housing the Bay Bakery (423 E. Silver Spring Dr.), the former Shorewood Village Bakery (4330 N. Oakland Ave.), Simma’s Ovens (817 N. 68th St.) and Glorioso’s Market (1020 E. Brady St.). During his 60-plus-year career, Zagel designed more than 1,500 buildings.
“He was very prolific,” says Russell Zimmermann, author and architectural historian. “He’s one of those secretive guys who supplied houses that everybody’s seen, everybody’s been inside of, and yet nobody knew anything about.”
Wirth believes Zagel is not as well-known as some contemporaries because he didn’t insist on listing
his name on building permits as, for example, Alexander Eschweiler did.
Zagel was born in Milwaukee in 1893. He studied engineering at UW-Madison before switching to architecture. In 1910, he apprenticed with architect John W. Menge Jr., then eventually opened his own practice. Zagel was still designing buildings until health problems forced him to retire just before his death in 1977.
“Zagel was influenced by the fact that his father and grandfather were stonemasons,” says Wirth. “Everything was a masonry structure. I don’t know of one wood structure he designed. And the outside was ornamental, all kinds of cast stone.”
During World War I, Zagel served with the Army Corps of Engineers. Afterward, he studied architecture in Germany and France and took particular notice of the castles along the Rhine that would inspire some of his more fanciful designs during the ’20s and ’30s.
“His stuff is creative and charming,” says Zimmermann. “What made his houses interesting were the details.”
With 1,500 buildings to his name, that’s a lot of details.
