In an interesting twist, a tiny Mediterranean-style bungalow in Riverwest – recently listed for sale for $279,900 by Parkway Realty – has an asking price that's $114 more per square foot than a Lake Drive mansion that was once home to a high-paid Bucks player.
Yesterday, I shared the story of the 1922 Lake Drive mansion built by Edward Schwartzburg, that was long home to one of the co-founders of the Nunn-Bush Shoe Co. and more recently was occupied by former Bucks player Larry Sanders.
The 5,612-square-foot home a block from Lake Park has five bedrooms and five and a half bathrooms. It's listed for $1.275 million.
Over in Riverwest, a one-bedroom, one-bathroom, single-story stone-clad bungalow at 3770 N. Humboldt Blvd., built in 1925 for the Singer Brothers, who owned land in the area (the adjacent street is called Singer Circle) for their greenhouses and landscaping business, is also on the market across from Kern Park.
The house was built to serve as an office for Singer Brothers, not to be a home, which makes sense considering its size and the fact that it has a walk-in vault in the living room.
It was converted to a residence after Singer Brothers folded at the end of the 1960s.
This adorable 820-square-foot house – which has long fascinated anyone who has taken a second to give it a look – is listed at $279,900.
Two beautiful houses – in two in-demand Milwaukee neighborhoods – built on wildly different scales.
A quick calculation shows that the Riverwest home's $341 per square foot asking price is considerably higher than the $227 per square foot price sought for the Lake Drive home. Note, too that the .16-acre Riverwest lot is almost exactly one half the size of the .33-acre Lake Drive lot.
While you might be tempted to think the bungalow owner is shooting for the moon, consider that the most recent assessment (as viewed today) on the City of Milwaukee's website is $224,200 and the home recently sold for $250,000. In that context, $297,900 is not an outrageous expectation.
(Note, too, that the site might not yet be updated with the assessments that were sent to homeowners this week.)
While one realtor told me that disparity is indeed interesting, another said that price per square foot isn't a data point realtors spend much time thinking about, and that it's a number of more interest to appraisers.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
