Mysteries of Milwaukee street names explained, from misspellings to renamings
Apparently, there are as many questions about street names as there are streets.
Readers have send dozens of queries about street names to What the Wisconsin?, the place where the Journal Sentinel takes on questions about our state, our communities and the people in them.
We have looked into whether Milwaukee streets named after other cities in Wisconsin lead to those locales (mostly, they do); why Mayfair Road has so many different names; and why Center Street is north of North Avenue.
To resolve more readers' street-related questions, we turned to Carl Baehr, who wrote the book on the subject: 1995's "Milwaukee Streets: The Stories Behind Their Names."
Baehr, a retired Milwaukee-area librarian, has completed work on a second edition. Still in need of a publisher, the new volume has 50% more information, including 50 new street names, more backstories — and a few stories that have changed as a result of his new research.
Why does Milwaukee have two different streets called Layton?
Over the past 40 years, portions of several Milwaukee streets have been renamed to better reflect the city's life and history. Most of North Third Street is now named for Martin Luther King Jr.; Fourth Street from St. Paul Avenue to Capitol Drive was named for Milwaukee civil rights giant Vel Phillips in 2018; and South 16th Street from Pierce Street to Mitchell Street was renamed Cesar E. Chavez Drive in 1996.
Such street-segment renaming wasn't new in Milwaukee. The stretch of 27th Street between National and Lincoln avenues was named for meatpacker and philanthropist Frederick Layton in 1909, in recognition of his gifts to the city, including the city's first art museum. The tribute even survived a city campaign in the late 1920s to standardize street names.
“They eliminated 100 or so street names … but they didn’t touch Layton Boulevard," Baehr said of city officials. "I think it was a new boulevard street, it was very fashionable, and of course Frederick Layton was the biggest philanthropist in the city.”
When Milwaukee expanded farther south via annexation in the 1950s, it picked up another Layton — Layton Avenue, which Cudahy founder Patrick Cudahy had also named after the meatpacker.
"So we ended up with two Laytons — avenue and boulevard — named after the same guy,” Baehr said.
Despite Milwaukee's efforts to eliminate duplicate street names, the Laytons aren't the only repeaters on city maps. There's the Washingtons (street, on the south side, and boulevard, on the west side) and the Lincolns (avenue and Memorial Drive).
And there are the Pierces. The Pierce Street just south of the Menomonee Valley is named for President Franklin Pierce; North Pierce Street in Riverwest is named for Jonathan Peirce, an 19th-century land speculator. “But they misspelled the name,” Baehr said.
Why is East Whittaker Avenue spelled with two T's and West Whitaker Avenue with one T?
The Whittaker/Whitaker dilemma is a tale of two cities: Cudahy and Milwaukee.
Meatpacking giant Patrick Cudahy had a big hand in shaping his namesake community, which became a village in 1895 and incorporated as a city in 1906, including naming streets in his southeast suburban community after friends in the meat industry.
“When Patrick Cudahy developed his community, he named the streets mostly after meatpackers, and this one was named after Francis Whittaker. And he spelled it correctly," Baehr said. Whittaker had meat processing operations in Kansas and Missouri in the 19th century; some of his operations were later bought by Cudahy.
When Milwaukee annexed the Town of Lake, just west of Cudahy, it picked up the existing street name, which for some reason outside Cudahy had dropped a T. It's unclear why, Baehr said. The fact that Whittaker and Whitaker don't connect — they're separated by I-94/43 at the Plainfield Curve — just reinforces their separateness.
Cudahy is not the only city with an unusual naming convention, Baehr said. Madison, the state capital, has streets named for signers of the U.S. Constitution.
Why are some Milwaukee streets called streets and others avenues?
Several readers noticed the inconsistency in Milwaukee's maps: Some are called streets, but there's also a lot of avenues. What's up with that?
Turns out, Baehr said, it was part of the city's big-city aspirations.
“Before the Civil War, everything was a street," he said. "And after the Civil War, they started creating avenues,” the latter deemed more stylish.
Baehr noted that there have been very few new "streets" in recent decades.
How did Howell Avenue get its name?
According to Baehr, in the 1830s the Howell family bought a large section of land in what became the town of Oak Creek along a six-mile route from College Avenue south to the Racine County line. The road that cut through it in 1840s became known as the Howell Road; Journal Sentinel archives have references to it as Howell Avenue as early as the 1880s.
Where is the Cold Spring on Cold Spring Road?
According to the historical marker on Cold Spring Road just east of South 108th Street, Cold Spring Road was given its name "by early settlers because of the prized natural springs along its western portion." But Baehr says he hasn't been able to determine just where that spring was located.
What's the real story behind Royall Place?
When Baehr wrote the first edition of "Milwaukee Street Names" in 1995, his research indicated that East Royall Place, a short East Side street running between Oakland and Prospect avenues, was named for Royall Houghton a Vermont-born developer whose family owned large parcels of land in what became Milwaukee.
But additional records discovered since then tell a different story.
Turns out, Baehr said, that the street was one of several in the city named by lawyer turned developer Joel Parker. Before he became a developer, Parker was a professor at Harvard Law School, for a time as the school's Royall Chair. (It was Harvard's first endowed chair; in recent years, it's been the source of controversy, since Isaac Royall Jr., who endowed the chair in the 18th century, was the one of the largest slaveowners in New England. He sold the enslaved people under his control when he fled to Canada and London at the start of the American Revolution, according to a 2022 Harvard Law post.)
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Mysteries of Milwaukee street names explained: Misspellings, renamings