02/06/2022: Audio has been re-uploaded with better quality. Same content - just better audio editing. Enjoy!
Transcripts
You're listening to Milwaukee Mafia, your weekly podcast dose of Wisconsin Mafia and true crime history. Hey everybody and welcome back to the Milwaukee Mafia podcast. This is our first episode. First story. I'm Eric Walterkens and I have Gavin Schmitt with me. And we're going to just jump right into the story. So Gavin, if you want to get started and I'll just chime in when I feel like it. Yeah, definitely, stop me at any point. So what we're gonna do for our very first episode is talk about something that's not the Mafia. How about that? Yeah that's great. This is the story of the Third Ward. We're gonna kind of set the stage. It's kind of more or less where the Summerfest grounds are, it's just south of the freeway, it goes through downtown. And you've got to imagine way back when Milwaukee was just being settled, this area of Milwaukee was all swampy. It was flat, it was not an area that the original settlers of Milwaukee wanted to live in. But they drained some land. Prospectors were building there, and the next big ethnic group to move in was the Irish. They started selling them lots of land. So the Irish are coming in. They're building their houses. They're building the warehouses. They're doing what they can do to make a home for themselves. John Gurda is probably the most famous historian. A quote, “It was filled in with Irish labor and covered with Irish housing as soon as the muck was dry” It'd also gained a reputation as the bloody third because apparently, the Irish were frequently drunk and engaged in fist fights. I don't know if this is true or this is what other people thought of them. It does sound like an Irish thing to do, right? Sorry to anybody out there that’s Irish, but stereotypes. There's gotta be a little bit of truth.
first big one was way back in:
other major thing. This is in:
ldings, and somewhere between:
This was kind of like the event of the season. You know. You want to go see this fire so I imagine this is like a firework show. There's like, people sitting around watching the city burn. Yeah, this was in the newspapers. Maybe an exaggeration, but they said that pretty much the only people in the city who didn't come out to watch this were infants, because they're infants, they're not going to leave. And people in jail. They said if you weren't exactly in danger, you probably were sitting in your front yard watching this happen. This is crazy. Well you said there were a ton of houses burned down. Yeah. So that's just amazing. That they're so few deaths. Yeah. I don't really get it. I mean, that's a miracle or what? Yes apparently people got out. Okay, good.
But it's burned down. In the:
and stuff and sell it up. By:
What is in the Third Ward now? Is there something that would be there that I would know? Chicago Avenue sounds familiar, but I'm trying to think where that is. Yeah I don't know what would stand out. It's kind of by the Summerfest grounds. Yeah. So if you're on 794, you get off on Michigan Avenue to go to Summerfest. That's basically that's where you are. Okay. I don't know what you would go to the Third Ward specifically for. Like, I mean, if you didn't live there. So, I don't know.
So what other questions do you have? Well, okay, so I mean, I guess I can ask a lot of questions but I'm afraid that they're gonna digress into something you might be covering. Yeah, but I guess questions too big we’ll just table until later. Okay. So, you've got this community. The Italian community comes in, starts settling in this area. I'm assuming that all these people that came here were all these Italians, but were not from the Mafia. No, we should basically be very clear early on. So 99% are perfectly fine people. So is it another episode where we learn what created the mafia? Like, who settles here becomes the Mafia, or how these Italians start to develop this? Like, you know, speak a little bit to that? Let's save that one a little bit. I really just want to kind of get the beginning settled in, which, you know, like you thought like right away, “Where is this going?” There was a reason I wanted to start here. But yeah, let's not get into that. Let’s keep this separate for now. Okay, we're gonna save that. Bad question. I don't know, it’s just for future episodes. So I don't really think I have any other questions at this point in time, okay? Okay.
Submit a question, we will happily address them at the beginning of our next - well we can't address them at the next episode because we’ll be done by the time the beginning of the next episode is recorded. Yeah. But submit them, and we will address them at any point in the future.
Gavin, hit them with the contact info, again, that would be great. Absolutely. So yeah, if you have questions about this or really anything at all about Milwaukee crime, history of Milwaukee, Italians in Milwaukee, anything like that, Feel free to send email.
