While legend (and, more convincingly, Carl Sandburg) has it that pioneering photographer Edward Steichen became Milwaukee’s first bike messenger when he strode into the Western Union office in the Chamber of Commerce Building on East Michigan Street in 1891, today’s Milwaukeeans – and our parents and grandparents – know that street-level space for something else.

X

Since the late 1960s, the spot at 219 E. Michigan St. has been beloved as the Swingin’ Door and Swingin’ Door Exchange bar and restaurant. But its history as a popular watering hole in the same building (now called the Mackie Building) as the Grain Exchange Room goes back decades earlier.

“There's a lot of stories, a lot of history in that place,” says Mike Murphy, now retired, who owned the Swingin’ Door for many years.

Shelley Sincere and her husband K.C. Swan – both industry veterans who worked together at Slim McGinn’s – now own the place and are writing the latest chapter of that history.

“It was a hangout for us before. We used to frequent the place. It was the fun spot for us after work,” says Swan. “So we definitely didn't want – or need – to change a whole lot besides cleaning it up.

“You have your ideas of what your dream restaurant will be and how it's going to be and what your menu's going to be, and then you slowly find out that you need to adapt to and work with what you have.”

What they have – since buying the place from Murphy in 2010 – is one of Downtown’s longest-running taverns and restaurants in an historic building.

The Mackie Building is a five-and-a-half-story Italianate office building designed by landmark Milwaukee architect Edward Townsend Mix (along with his employee and future partner Walter Holbrook) as an investment property for railroad magnate and U.S. Congressman Alexander Mitchell in 1879.

The imposing but beautiful building – whose facade is capped with a towering belfry – was erected across the alley from the Mix-designed Mitchell Building, a five-story Second Empire gem also owned by Mitchell, who in just a couple years had, with these two buildings, changed the city skyline.

Mitchell pulled down a three-story commercial building on the site to make way for his second grand architectural statement, which he’d had designed by the same architect who drew his elite Grand Avenue mansion, (now home to the Wisconsin Club).

The Mackie Building was originally called the Chamber of Commerce Building but being – then, as now – home to the important and beautiful Grain Exchange, the building was also colloquially known as the Grain Exchange Building, too.

X

The building opened in 1880 and its westernmost ground floor retail space became home to a Western Union telegraph office. This is where, in 1891, the resourceful tween-aged Steichen reportedly stopped in and bet he could deliver telegrams more quickly on his bike that Western Union’s other messengers could using other means.

He was hired and the story goes that he became Milwaukee’s first bike messenger. A 1909 photo taken outside the office shows that the bike messenger fleet had grown immensely in the interim.

It is believed that Harry Houdini – when he was still called Erik Weisz – was also a Western Union bike messenger in Milwaukee.

X

The idea that Steichen became the country’s first bike messenger is possible, as Western Union seems to be acknowledged as the first in the country to use bike couriers, suggesting it is possible that Steichen’s idea did spread through the Western Union network.

The idea, however, was hardly new in 1891, as elsewhere in North America – in Toronto, more specifically – T.B. Baily was offering this service at least as early as 1880.

But I digress.

According to City Directories, Western Union was still in the location in 1932, but that wouldn’t last much longer. (It also had a location nearby in the Wells Building).

Despite later advertisements claiming the bar opened in 1930 – which seemed somewhat unlikely as Prohibition was still the law of the land – the first appearance of The Exchange Tavern in the Milwaukee City Directory came in 1933, the year that Repeal arrived.

Dave Schuster has been recorded in history as the early operator of The Exchange, but that first City Directory entry names his brother Aaron as the proprietor (as do city permits from April 1933 and August 1934). Perhaps Aaron – who operated the Liberty Print shop on 7th and Walnut – may have funded his younger brother’s entry into the saloon business.

(Confusingly, the City of Milwaukee also has overlapping permit applications from April 1933 suggesting that a Jos. Gentilli [sic] Jr. was also applying to operate a "soft drink parlor [tavern]" in the same space. However, no other source mentions Gentilli – likely Gentile – so he probably never made it past the permit application.)

Aaron was born in 1893 and David about 12 years later in Russia and the family came to Milwaukee around 1913. There were three other brothers, too, including Max, born around 1901.

According to an obituary in the Jewish Chronicle, David Schuster broke his leg soon after his arrival here and learned English from the volunteer “Gray Ladies” while he was in the hospital.

When his father – a bookbinder by trade – struggled to find work, Schuster left Ninth Street School after the fifth grade to help support his family by selling newspapers on 4th and Wisconsin.

When David was a teenager, the family moved to Stoughton.

X

"The people in Stoughton took a liking to him, too," his wife Lillian told the Journal Sentinel in 1995, and he found a job managing a hotel. But when that business soured after a few years, the Schusters returned to Milwaukee.

Once back in Milwaukee, Schuster went into retail, managing a women’s hat store and a military surplus store.

In 1933, he opened The Exchange, presumably with assistance from Aaron and there’s a great photo hanging inside the Swingin’ Door Exchange today showing staff and customers at the tavern’s grand opening party on April 22, 1933, just 15 days after the end of Prohibition.

On the photo, David – who went by “Dave” – is named as “manager.”

In 1935, Dave and his brother Max opened the Kirchhoff & Rose-designed Cape Cod Inn at 319 E. Mason St., which became a Milwaukee hotspot, drawing visiting celebrities like Cary Grant, Jimmy Durante and Brew City native Spencer Tracy. The Cape Cod is also where the ill-fated Carl Zeidler reportedly met with supporters and decided to run for mayor. (Zeidler resigned as mayor in 1942 after serving two years and enlisted in the Navy. He was lost at sea later that year.)

In 1953, the two brothers opened Schuster Brothers Liquor Store at 226 E. Mason St., but just three months later, Max died of a heart attack.

X

In 1954, Dave opened the first restaurant in the Jewish Community Center and two years later he closed the Cape Cod Inn. In 1957, he opened a restaurant in the still-new Bockl Building, 2040 W. Wisconsin Ave., naming it Dave Schuster’s Restaurant.

In May 1960, Aaron also suffered a fatal heart attack after chasing some boys who had broken into the charred remains of Liberty Printing, which had burned in a three-alarm fire in March. The same year Dave had a heart attack, which led him away from the hospitality game.

Instead, he went back to school, taking adult education classes at Marquette University. Earning his real estate license in 1967, he began working in commercial real estate.

Back at The Exchange, by the early 1940s, Ferdinand Buben had taken over along with his wife Amalia.

The Hungarian-born Bubens had been involved in taverns and restaurants for many years, operating a saloon on Broadway in the 1910s and reportedly doing a stint in the Miller Cafe at Mason and Water before opening Buben and Brochmann Restaurant with a partner on the northwest corner of Oakland and Locust in 1923.

In 1933, they moved the restaurant to Green Bay Road just north of Capitol Drive, before the Bubens moved over to The Exchange, where Amalia did the cooking.

Meanwhile, Ferdinand was, according to a newspaper report, a founder of the Old Settlers Club, and well-known as an amateur violinist who was instrumental in get the “old Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra” going.

Amalia died in 1956 and Ferdinand continued on a little while longer, retiring in 1959. After suffering several strokes over the course of a few years, he died in 1962.

Buben had sold his place to an interesting character who surely changed the vibe – as well as the name – of the saloon.

Fred S. Jordan was a halfback for the Milwaukee Badgers,  who were in the NFL from 1922 to ‘26, playing alongside no less than Paul Robeson at Athletic Field (later renamed Borchert Field).

After playing for the Milwaukee Lapham semi-pro team, Jordan joined the Badgers in 1923 for the team’s only winning season, and Robeson reportedly played for the squad the following year.

Murphy recalls that Jordan was more than a football player, too, saying, “he was a Golden Gloves boxer back in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”

“As a restaurateur and innkeeper in the 1930s, he ran taverns that attracted the highest of Milwaukee’s high rollers,” wrote one newspaper. “As a gambler, he stayed one step ahead of the law – although sometimes the law caught up.”

With Repeal, Jordan began working in saloons including the Sportsman’s Bar on Plankinton Avenue then the Empire Cocktail Lounge, at 716 N. Plankinton, from 1940 to ‘53, Jordan’s Restaurant and Tavern, at 718 N. Water St, from 1954 to ‘56, and Jordan’s Tavern and Restaurant at 8801 N. Port Washington Rd. in Bayside until he declared bankruptcy in 1958.

In 1967, during his time in the old Exchange Tavern, Jordan was accused in a criminal complaint of taking a bet on a Packers game from a reporter who was working on an investigative story about gambling in the city.

That’s when four other guys took over the place, according to Mike Murphy.

“These insurance guys had it, and they thought they were going to make enough money to drink for nothing and have all their girlfriends in there, and it turned out it didn't work out,” he recalls. “So Dick Vohla was the manager for them, and he hired me to tend bar for him, and I did that.”

Murphy had been cutting hair in the barber shop in a retail space on the opposite side of the Mackie Building entrance – the Swingin’ Door Barber Shop is still there, run by John Ricco – when Vohla figured that as a barber Murphy knew all the folks in the neighborhood and would be a draw.

X

In 1973, Murphy and Vohla bought the place and they knocked out a wall and took over the space next door. That spot had been rented out as an office until 1945, when a soda fountain and lunch counter opened there, later replaced by the Mackie Grill restaurant and then Lee’s Coffee Shop.

“The coffee shop was empty, and the building owner said that they couldn't knock the wall out because it was a (load-) bearing wall, holding up the clock tower above the building,” Murphy recalls. “There was a trap door where they used to pass food from the coffee shop into the tavern, because we didn't have a kitchen in the tavern at the time.

“So one day I was looking around and I opened up the trap door and I let it go, and it fell all the way down out of sight. ‘What the hell is that all about,’ I thought. So I got looking with a flashlight and I could see all the way to Michigan Street. I said, 'what the f*ck? This ain't a bearing wall.' So I got a sledgehammer with a guy and knocked the wall out. We went in there and have been in there ever since.

“Dick passed away 18 years after we were together, and then I took over and that's it.”

While Murphy was running the place, he also got the license to provide the liquor for events upstairs in the Grain Exchange Room, a popular wedding and events venue.

He also tapped local photographer and sometime employee David Bernacchi to recreate the vintage photos of The Exchange Tavern grand opening party and the Western Union bike messengers out front. Those images are framed and still have pride of place on the wall.

The Swingin’ Door was a busy lunch place when the Downtown Milwaukee offices were humming. But Murphy, as much as he seems to love a good time, was getting tired and wanted to get back to cutting hair.

“I was getting up there, and then when I turned 65, I got married for the first time,” he recalls, “and Joe Bartolotta took over the Grain Exchange Room. I lost that contract, so that was like $700,000 a year. And the Swinging Door couldn't support itself, and it was time for me to get out anyway. And so I sold it to a friend of mine."

Enter Sincere and Swan, who have been there nearly 15 years now. One of their first moves was to put the “Exchange” back into the name.

X

“We opened up Nov. 5, 2010, and have been going ever since,” says Swan. “We wanted to keep the nostalgia of the place and the history. We were good friends with Mike Murphy for a long time and knew a little bit of his history.

“So we wanted to keep that. We knew that it was called the Exchange Tavern in 1933, so initially we were going to call it that, but you don't give up the notoriety of Swingin’ Door for 43 years, so we combined the two names.

Because they have bar/restaurant backgrounds they wanted to boost the restaurant side a bit, too, so they added regular dinner service. During his tenure, Murphy served only lunch and a Friday fish fry dinner.

“We made our own menu and changed the dinner hours, and we were doing seven days a week serving until 10 at night. It took a couple years to build up that night business.”

But then there were a few hiccups.

First was the restoration and renovation of the building.

“For a while there we were covered in a black tarp shroud,” says Swan. “That was a nerve wracking, scary time, but we still showed an increase in sales, remarkably.”

And then there was the pandemic, which changed the landscape of Downtown dining, especially for a place known as a lunch and after-work drink spot for office workers.

X

But, says Swan, like the surprising boost during the “shroud” years, the pandemic didn’t necessarily affect business that much, though it did change it.

“There's been a shift because of so many hotels that have been built, and we have regulars from across the country, but our business has definitely shifted," he says. "We see a lot from out of town. We're definitely more event-driven (now), and we have more out-of-town customers than ever before.”

Before I go, Swan shows me the old Western Union-era vault that’s now liquor storage and there's a 1908 calendar still hanging on the wall. Among other vintage notes taped up in there is a list of phone numbers from the Jordan era, with the owner’s phone number followed by that of his German cook Ingrid Wolf, as well as Jordan’s old home address.

X

In what is now the office – formerly the kitchen of the Mackie Grill next door – there’s another vault that was converted into a pipe chase when the upper floor offices were transformed into residential units.

Swan also points out the large stained glass window, which has a prominent Masonic symbol in the center, and adds that he has no idea why it’s there.

X

But he appreciates it, along with all the other remnants of the long, storied past of this Downtown landmark.

“We've been working on our reputation,” he says, “making good food and just being a fun Downtown historical joint."