Just goes to show you it has always been party time on Brady Street. I remember my grandfather telling me that the draft office was in the Carpenter Building during World War II (with an entrance on 6th Street). The theater also had a 15-lane bowling center in the basement. The Pabst and its northerly neighbor were demolished and replaced, after a period of inactivity, with 100 East Wisconsin.Īnother view of 5th and Wisconsin, this one looking northwest and showing Schwartz and the Voom Voom Room, but, best of all, offering a look at the Carpenter Building, with the old Wisconsin Theater – which opened in 1924 – and its then-extant sign for the rooftop ballroom.
Speaking of The Pabst Building, you can see it at right in this photo showing the construction of the new Wisconsin Avenue bridge over the Milwaukee River. Looking east on Wisconsin Avenue from roughly the southeast corner at 6th Street, we get a wider view – you can spy The Pabst Building in the distance – of photo No. But it was also a live music venue for many years before that. This spot on the northwest corner of 5th and Wisconsin was the Voom Voom Room strip club. And look at Schwartz Bookshop over there on the corner, before it moved to the Iron Block in the '80s. Some of us remember when City News was Motown Beauty Supply. There's the old Strand Theater, as well as a pizza by the slice place that was definitely gone by the time I got here in 1983 and found a pizza slice desert. Looking northeast toward 5th and Wisconsin. Through a gap at left, you can see the building that was long home to Radio Doctors. Seems kinda bustling doesn't it? You can see the Wisconsin Hotel lingering there in the background. In these days, there was no Grand Avenue Mall, and 3rd Street went through between Wisconsin and Michigan. This entire block came down soon after and was replaced with the Henry Reuss Federal Plaza, including the 1940s-era Esquire Theater. As for the slides of Szopieray's shots Levin found at the antiques store, he nabbed four boxes at a 10-spot a box. The Milwaukee County Historical Society actually has a collection of more than 25,000 of Szopieray's images, documenting the Milwaukee area from 1935 through 1985.
Levin – who runs the Old Milwaukee group on Facebook and has posted some of the images there – found the pictures, taken by Ray Szopieray. Thanks to Milwaukeean and photographer Adam Levin, who found a treasure trove of old Kodachrome half-frame slides of Milwaukee in an antiques store, we can offer up these gorgeous photos of the city as it appeared in the mid-to-late 1970s.
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