TAKING BACK OUR STREETS
Following World War II, the streets of Sherman Park began to change. Once home almost exclusively to middle-class German immigrants, the neighborhood became a locus of postwar black migration. Large numbers of African Americans moved to the neighborhood in search of affordable real estate and proximity to the 30th Street manufacturing corridor, the site of many of Milwaukee’s largest employers including A.O. Smith, United Milwaukee Scrap, Capitol Stampings, and Master Lock. Factory jobs were plentiful, the commute was easy, and the neighborhood quickly became home.
By the 1960s, however, discriminatory housing practices like racially restrictive covenants, redlining, and blockbusting sought to re-segregate the neighborhood. Worse yet, the city exercised eminent domain across a large swath of the Sherman Park and Bronzeville neighborhoods, razing homes along Fond du Lac and North Avenues to make way for the proposed Park West Freeway. Though the freeway project was ultimately defeated prior to construction, the path of devastation was never rehabilitated and lingers even today. Over the next two decades, Milwaukee (like many American cities) faced a decline in manufacturing, resulting in rampant job loss across the entire North Side, including and especially in Sherman Park. Many of the major employers in the 30th Street Corridor were shuttered. In the subsequent decades, the largely abandoned area has become the site of hazardous flooding; in July 2010, flash flooding caused $32 million in damages and the destruction of 19 homes. In Sherman Park, themes of crime, unsafe streets, discriminatory policing, and property damage often come up. Residents perceive that the police department runs top-down, ignoring the actual needs of the community. Government policies and harsh penalties have led to decades of mass incarceration that continues to plague the Sherman Park neighborhood. When incarcerated individuals are released, they face a significant lack of opportunities in their community, including inequitable or restricted access to fair housing, transportation, and jobs. On the North Side, transit injustice thus takes many forms. Thoroughfares like North Avenue have literally been stripped of signs of life, with little reinvestment to show for it, even decades later. The departure of manufacturing and subsequent flooding in the 30th Street Corridor left Sherman Park residents unemployed; many of whom were unable to find a new job due to poor public transit options connecting Sherman Park to other parts of the city and surrounding suburbs. Mobility-related injustices like these are also time injustices. Your time is no longer your own when you lack access to—or are forbidden from—driving a car, making you beholden to infrequent or inaccurate bus schedules, the cancellation of key routes taking you to and from work, the high cost of taxis and rideshares, or bearing the burden of braving the Wisconsin winter on foot. |
Resistance to this notion—of Sherman Park as isolated, inaccessible, or desolate—abound, both within the neighborhood and in Milwaukee at large. November 2018 marked the opening of the Sherman Phoenix, a retail and event space for small businesses-of-color to foster community and bring jobs back to the neighborhood. The Phoenix’s home was formerly a BMO Harris Bank building, damaged in the fires of the 2016 uprising.
On the municipal scale, the City of Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District are investing in storm-water basins designated to protect the 30th Street Corridor, particularly in anticipation of changing weather patterns due to climate change. In 2018, the Center for Community Investment, a program of the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, selected Milwaukee as one of six sites to receive “coaching and funding to help attract capital for investment in disadvantaged communities” over the next two years, according to the Milwaukee Business Journal.
Community members have also begun reinvesting in the area, most notably through projects like ArtWorks’ mural project. Community associations like the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation, emphasizing resident input and reinvestment in this part of the city, are highlighting the emergent changes in perspective surrounding the corridor. To take back their streets, residents maintain block watches and police the streets themselves. They are beautifying their green space and taking ownership of their community through projects like the Peace Garden Project. Community members also have begun putting pressure on their elected officials and local scholars (including us!) to listen, engaged in productive dialogue, and enact focused and sustainable change. Through efforts like these, Sherman Park is reclaiming its identity, fostering development of a neighborhood that is beautiful, shared, and active. Step by step, Sherman Park is taking back their streets—from decades of segregation, from immense job losses, and from crime and mass incarceration. |