Back when Milwaukee was one of the manufacturing marvels of the Midwest, there was the money to build the kinds of houses you see dotted around the area.
I don’t mean the opulent, eye-popping mansions of the barons, but the handsome gems erected by administrators and even by middle management in Story Hill, Washington Heights, Wauwatosa, Sherman Park, Enderis Park or any number of other areas.
Homes like the one that architects Wolff & Ewens designed for Western Grip & Trunk Co. secretary-treasurer Frank Stockhausen and his wife Elizabeth.
That house at 2518 N. 1st St., now divided into rental units, is now for sale in the Harambee neighborhood.
The brick English Revival-style house is gorgeous outside with two gables (one in stucco), porches that span the entire facade on the first and second floors, fine masonry and a stalwart but homey feel.
The 3,297-square-foot house – which has four one-bed, one-bath apartments and a much larger three-bedroom, one-bathroom unit that includes a formal dining room – is listed for $599,000. It includes six off-street parking spots.
It’s also walking distance to Fischberger’s, Pete’s Fruit Market and Riverwest Co-op, just sayin’.
William Wolff and Joseph Ewens were local architects who were, for a time, the preferred firm of Miller Brewing Company and they designed a number of tied houses, including the Miller Cafe, which still stands on the northwest corner of Mason and Water Streets.
That latter building also housed the architects’ offices.
Among the other saloons they drew for Miller included the homes of Uncle Wolfie's, Tess and Braise, the fairly recently demolished Judge's on North Avenue, and others.
The firm, which operated from 1895 until 1917, also designed the Miller Hotel and Theater on North 3rd Street.
Wolff, who was born in Schwerin (Mecklenberg), Germany in 1853 studied architecture at the Universities of Paris, Vienna and Bonn before arriving in Milwaukee in 1889, where he would find employment as a draftsman in the office of Charles Kirchhoff, who, incidentally, was one of the go-to tied house architects for Schlitz.
Ewens was born in Milwaukee to a contractor father who later, in 1894, ventured into insurance and real estate with his sons (Ewens' brothers).
After working as a stenographer with the William H. Schmidt Sash and Door Company, Ewens also went to work for Kirchhoff, where he is said to have been an apprentice and where he met Wolff.
Otherwise, it appears he had no formal architectural training and it is possible he left those details to his partner while he focused on drumming up business and keeping the books.
However, Ewens did design some houses later in life – after he’d worked for a time in non-architectural positions in the steel business – suggesting that he must have, by that point, possessed at least some architectural skill.
Their clients on this job, meanwhile, were the newly married Frank Stockhausen and Elizabeth Keyser, who tied the knot on April 28, 1908.
Francis Xavier Stockhausen was born in 1867 in Newburg, Wisconsin to German immigrants John Stockhausen and Catherine Scherer, and came to Milwaukee in 1888.
Elizabeth Gertrude Keyser, who was born in Milwaukee in 1877, was the daughter of Matthew Keyser and Anna Roth, who had also immigrated from Germany.
At ages 40 and 30, respectively, neither was all that young for a marrying couple in those days. But perhaps that put them in the kind of financial position of being able to immediately engage a well-known architecture firm to build a big, beautiful house and to employ a servant, which they did.
After the house was completed – it was constructed by carpenter Fred Hoenig and mason August Buchholz – the Stockhausens would likely have felt quite at home in the heavily German neighborhood.
Stockhausen was, at this time, vice president of the trunk business – located on 30th Street between Garfield and North – and that income surely must’ve been lucrative, as by 1912 he owned an automobile, too. This, at a time when somewhere between 10 and 18 people per 1,000 owned one.
In a newspaper testimonial, Stockhausen beamed of his Hartford, Wisconsin-made car, “Like it? I must say that I do. The KisselKar is the first real automobile I ever owned and the KisselKar company takes such good care of a fellow that really I don’t know what more a man could want.”
During these years, Elizabeth would host regular card parties in the house, often to raise money for St. Gall, where she was involved and, presumably, a member.
Workers at Western Trunk – where Elizabeth’s brother Henry was also an officer (and later, after serving as president, opened the Keyser Luggage Shop in the Pabst Building downtown) – were doing less well, striking in 1910 when the company fired union leaders in the wake of the formation of the bargaining body.
By 1920, the Stockhausen family needed all the space in the big 1st Street house as they now had five boys: 10-year-old Paul, 8-year-old Andrew, 5-year-old Francis, Lawrence – who was two-and-a-half – and 9-month-old Cyril.
By this time, Stockhausen had become president of the firm, and as early as 1927 the family – which still had four sons living at home at that point – had moved out west to 1902 N. Hi-Mount Blvd. Perhaps the fact that Stockhausen had risen to the top of the trunk-making company meant he could (or should, for the sake of appearances) move to a swankier address.
However, things didn't go well much longer.
Frank died in 1932 after a fall in a bank on 3rd and Center Streets and not long after, the Western Grip & Trunk Co. seems to have faded away.
Elizabeth passed away 36 years later, in 1968.
It’s possible the Stockhausens were the only family to occupy the entire house as at least by the early 1930s, a parade of names appears in newspapers at the address suggesting there were already multiple units. In fact, among the references I rarely see the same name twice.
A 1944 classified real estate ad describes it as having five three-room apartments that bring in $2,934 in rent each year (back then it had a two-car garage).
The house seems to have been for sale either nearly continuously or repeatedly into the start of the 1950s and again in 1964 and ‘67 (in the latter ad it’s described as a four-family with all two-bedroom units).
A 1969 listing says the home’s then-five units rented for $70, and the garage was still standing.
These days, the house – which has been historically designated as part of the North First Street Historic District since the 1980s (though the owners of this house at the time, Wauwatosa's Kelmann Co., opposed the designation) – has hardwood floors, a fireplace and some of its old woodwork, but mostly it appears to have been modernized inside.
You can find the complete listing here.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
