My new favorite street name in Milwaukee: Port Sunlight Way.
It's one I'd never encountered until I started nosing around the Garden Homes neighborhood – originally organized as a planned community – on the North Side.
Many of the 93 homes in this small district – based off nine basic exterior designs by architect William H. Schuchardt – recall the houses in another nearby planned community, the Village of Greendale.
The Garden Homes idea was first floated by Milwaukee's sewer socialists, namely Mayor Emil Seidel, in 1910, to address the city's housing shortage. But it wasn't until after World War I, which put even more pressure on housing in Milwaukee, that the idea for a cooperative development came about; one that was funded by the sale of stock.
You can read a good, detailed history of Garden Homes and the buildings in it in this PDF report prepared by the late Paul Jakubovich.
Port Sunlight, a model industrial village near Liverpool, is one of five English planned community "garden cities" that were honored with street names when the Garden Homes subdivision was platted in 1921.
It's likely that the name is one Schuchardt came across during his 1911 trip to England to study these communities.
Port Sunlight Way is the only one of these names to survive in Garden Homes. The others were all renamed later in the 1920s, when half of Ealing became Congress (and half was vacated), Bourneville became 26th east of Garden Homes Park, Letchworth became 26th west of Garden Homes Park, and Hampstead became 25th Street.
After the state legislature authorized the sale of the homes – they'd previously been leased – the Garden Homes cooperative was disbanded. The neighborhood, with 93 buildings – including 105 residential units – and a park, called Garden Homes Park (pictured above) was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.
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.
