(UPDATE: This article was updated with new information about the construction of the house and Vander Heyden family photos.)
If there’s one thing you don’t find very often in a Milwaukee-area real estate listing it’s the use of the description “Art Moderne.”
I toured it the day the listing went live late last week and it’s a striking Streamline Moderne home with sleek likes and alluring curves and some glass block sections. It’s perched up above the street with a decent-sized and private backyard that abuts some quiet woods with the County Grounds beyond.
There are few vintage residential examples of this style, popular in the 1930s and ‘40s, around here. One of them, a 1937 house at 1251 N. 86th St., at the end of Tosa street next to some woods, is currently on the market.
It’s got a bit of a front porch and a nice second-story balcony overlooking the backyard where there’s another covered patio below. Yet another outdoor seating area on the side overlooks the woods.
It’s an incredibly unique and interesting house for the area.
Inside, it’s beautiful and feels more spacious than the listing stats might suggest. In 1990, extra space was added, altering both the interior and exterior.
But inside it is not as strikingly Moderne as it is on the outside.
You can see numerous photos of the home – inside and out – which has two bedrooms and two full bathrooms across 2,634 square feet, in the listing. The asking price is $690,000.
(It also has a very Wisconsin feature: as soon as you step inside from the foyer, there’s a bar to your left in what had originally been a circular dining room.)
This is also the rare home about which I could find very little official information regarding the initial design and construction.
The City of Wauwatosa has no records pertaining to its creation, only a couple permits from the 1990 addition. The Wisconsin Historical Society's Architectural Inventory does not name an architect, and there's no trace of plans in either the Wisconsin Architectural Archive or newspapers. Neither AIA Wisconsin (including online copies of its magazine from the late 1930s) nor Docomomo Wisconsin could help.
What’s interesting is that despite searching high and low for an architect of the house, the sole tidbit I found was from the owners that did the 1990 addition, Laura Marx and Rick Thrun.
In a booklet detailing their plan for the home, they wrote that the house was “hand built in 1937 by a Dutch mason.”
The house was built for Lawrence Vander Heyden and his wife Irene (nee Olson), who married in 1933.
Vander Heyden was born in Oconto in 1895 into a family with quite a few kids, a number of which followed their father John into the construction business. In fact, some of them worked for his company, McGucken & Vander Heyden.
Though Lawrence was born in Wisconsin, Vander Heyden is definitely a Dutch surname. John Vander Heyden was born in Schaijk, in the Netherlands, near Rotterdam.
Lawrence Vander Heyden got his start in business in 1930 as the owner of Brake & Speedometer Service on 12th and State, near his family's home, but by the time the Tosa house was built, he was a partner in the Ready Mix Concrete Company.
At the same time, his brother Arthur and father John had invested in Cities Fuel & Supply Co. on 67th and National Avenue, which made Waylite Blocks. Other family members would later invest, too.
These blocks used cellular slag – a porous and therefore lightweight material that is made by rapidly cooling molten slag during the smelting process to create a foam-like consistency – as aggregate to create uniform building blocks rather than the typical gravel or crushed stone found in other blocks.
Also concurrently, the family's Vander Heyden, Inc. was in business, also on 67th and National Avenue, at the Cities Fuel location.
Over the years, the Vander Heydens did everything: paved roads, sold gravel, operated the first Ford motor car rental business and more.
Though family members doubt the Vander Heydens would've used anything that might be considered scrapts, Thrun recalled having heard that the "Dutch mason," “would bring stone/concrete blocks home from his other work sites. When we started remodeling we could see the house was put together with all these different parts."
In 1944, another brother Bernard "Doc" Vander Heyden patented the Dox Block/Plank system of hollow core cast concrete blocks that could be assembled into planks for floors and roofs in addition to walls. These blocks used Waylite aggregate.
After World War II all six Vander Heyden brothers were working in the family business.
According to Bernard's daughter, Anita Hagen, the house was indeed built by the family company using the materials her father invented. Her sister Roxanne says that their dad told her in 1997 that he had designed the house.
Down in the basement, I noticed that instead of wood or steel joists, this house had joists that appeared to be made of brick-sized blocks formed into a beam shape, which is exactly how Dox Planks were used.
Tapping on them resulted in a hollow sound that suggested the hollow core of Dox Block and the "foam-like" quality of Waylite.
Alas, I couldn’t find a brand name or anything quite so obvious on any of the blocks.
In a 1949 newspaper article, Bernard said, "The concrete products industry for years has sought to develop masonry units which could be used like lumber. Today that search has been successful. In our own plan concrete flooring is made from the individual block to the finished concrete 'plank' which is loaded on trucks and delivered to the home site.
"Concrete flooring, relatively new, is in great demand as a utility with radiant heating. Being fireproof, it cuts home owners' fire insurance rates for one thing. And termites can't touch it, which in some parts of the country is important."
At that time, the Vander Heyden Co. could churn out 2,000 blocks per hour and create 1,600 square feet of plank in an eight-hour day and expected to soon be able to double that capacity.
The Sentinel noted that the eight-inch blocks weighed 28 pounds and reportedly made good acoustic insulation, too.
The planks could be made up to 17 feet long and were cured with steam.
According to Bernard, the planks were being used in the roofs and floors of churches, schools, hospitals, barns and homes. And...
"At present," he told the Sentinel, "our company is planning an economy masonry home, feeling that the material we use is of the lowest cost on the market."
"Vander Heyden, Inc.," the Sentinel added in its 1949 article, "also has a plan servce from designs by Milwaukee architects for those who want to build their own home using the firm's material."
A glance at this 1939 Cities Fuel ad makes me wonder if architect Marshall E. Vierheilig was involved with Doc Vander Heydeon on Lawrence's home.
(NOTE: Vierheilig was born in 1885 and studied at the University of Illinois and apprenticed in masonry, plumbing and carpentry before opening his own business in 1910, focusing on designing and building churches, stores and residences. After retiring around 1960, Vierheilig worked as the supervising architect at Forest Home Cemetery. Interestingly, Vierheilig – who was still a registered architect in 1967 – lived in a house at 2537 W. Pierce St. that he helped build while he was a carpenter's apprentice.)
Could it mean that Lawrence's home was a model or even a test of what the firm could offer to its customers? Was Vierheilig one of the architects supplying plans to Vander Heyden, Inc.?
The house was clearly something of a concrete showhouse. Down in the basement I could see that even the subfloor of the main floor was concrete, and Thrun and Marx noted in the book they put together that, “the entire structure of the house is a combination of concrete block and poured concrete. All of the interior walls were load bearing.”
The Vander Heydens' business boomed as they sold licenses for the manufacture of the blocks/planks. A decade later there were 26 plants making Dox and the company moved its headquarters to St. Paul, to which Doc and Lawrence relocated.
After the business peaked in the 1960s, Vander Heyden retired to his farm in Amherst. He died of a stroke in 1989.
Doc continued on in the business, making concrete panels for building exteriors, decorative block and continually improving Dox Blocks and updating his patents.
He died in 2005 at the age of 96.
Every house has a story and this one has a few interesting tales to tell, including a bit later on in its life.
Sarah Marx Feldner is the listing agent for the house.
Not only did her mother Laura Marx and stepfather Rick Thrun own the house for a time and put on that addition, but Sarah lived in the house as a teen.
“It feels really cool,” she says as she unlocks the front door of her childhood home to show me around. “I feel really honored and special (to be able to list the house). The seller is a great guy.”
Her mother and stepfather sold the house decades ago and it has had multiple owners in the interim. But she says not much has changed.
“It makes me really proud of them,” she says, “because their vision, what they did 20, 30 years ago is still (here).”
In addition to doubling the floor space of the house, while maintaining the horizontal “streamline” aspect of the building, they also opened up the existing floor plan using steel beams hidden in soffits whenever a load-bearing concrete wall was removed or altered.
A bedroom, sunroom and foyer were added.
Part of the idea was to create two “apartments.”
“The owners and their teenage daughter (aka Sarah) wanted to separate their private spaces,” they wrote in the book. “This was accomplished by designing the house into two apartment areas, meeting in the middle with communal family areas.”
Despite the vaunted insulation properties of Waylite Blocks, they also found they needed to insulate the walls, roofs and windows to keep the Wisconsin winter at bay.
Then, they painted the white exterior in a scheme that was meant to evoke the famed Art Deco and Art Moderne buildings of Miami Beach.
“They had it pink in the ‘90s,” Sarah says with a laugh. “How crazy is that?”
There was some turquoise, too, of course ... it being the dawn of the 1990s. (Nowadays the stucco is painted a grey-ish hue.)
The book they assembled speaks to the pride they took in their transformation of the place.
“They loved it,” she says, but ultimately, “they went to a condo Downtown, where they worked in the Third Ward.”
Perhaps the best story of all is how Marx and Thrun came to own the house in the first place.
“I used to play soccer down there,” says Sarah pointing through the woods to the County Grounds. “It used to be called The Pig Farm (the soccer field was located next to the potter’s field) and one day they turned down the wrong street and saw this house.
“They went up to the door and knocked on it and said, ‘Would you sell us this home?’ And then the owners of this home got in their car, followed my parents to their house and ended up buying their house and they swapped homes’.”
That Victorian on 71st and Milwaukee Avenue also just recently changed ownership.
“That home,” Sarah adds, “just sold two weeks ago. My two childhood homes.”
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.
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