Polish Milwaukee and the Flat That Changed American Housing

Polish immigration to Milwaukee began in the eighteen forties with a small trickle and became, by the eighteen eighties, one of the largest mass relocations of any ethnic group to any American city. By nineteen ten, nearly seventy thousand Polish Milwaukeeans lived on the city's South Side, second in number only to the German community. They worked in the tanneries, the iron foundries, the meat-packing plants, the railroad shops. They built churches. They built schools. And they invented a style of house.

The Polish flat is an architectural form that exists almost nowhere else in America with the density it exists in Milwaukee. It began as a modest wood-frame cottage built by a Polish immigrant family with limited capital. As the years passed and earnings accumulated, the family would hire jacks, raise the original cottage off its foundation, and underpinning it with a full brick or block half-basement. What had been a single-family house became a two-unit building practically overnight, with the family renting the lower unit to generate income. The building inspector's technical term was English basement duplex. The neighborhood term was Polish flat.

Block after block of Milwaukee's South Side was rebuilt this way, house by house, across three or four decades. The result was a form of working-class wealth accumulation built into the architecture itself.

The spiritual center of Polish Milwaukee was the Basilica of Saint Josaphat, built between eighteen ninety-seven and nineteen oh one on West Lincoln Avenue. The parish had been founded in eighteen eighty-eight as an offshoot of Saint Stanislaus. The building was constructed partly from salvaged materials, including stone and architectural elements purchased from the demolition of Chicago's Federal Building, which were shipped to Milwaukee by barge. Pope Pius the Eleventh designated it a minor basilica in nineteen twenty-nine, the third such designation in the United States.