Yesterday’s Milwaukee
Chapman’s Biggest Department Store
The third Chapman's store was built in 1885 and would remain in business nearly a century.
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The third Chapman's store was built in 1885 and would remain in business nearly a century. Back to the full article.
Photos - Page 3
I bought my very first pair of Levi’s at Chapman’s in 1981. That place was awesome!
I remember watching that beautiful building being torn down. It was in the early 80’s. There was nothing wrong with that building that couldn’t be fixed simply. But it was fashionable to tear down old beauties… mostly for parking lots for suburban commuters. Every day on the bus, I’d watch them struggle to knock it down… it was so disturbing. In it’s place they built that hideous cement behemoth.
And now some talk about tearing down the beautiful, art deco Journal Sentinel Building and Boston Store!! Same mistakes as 35 years ago. Developers have learned nothing!
The store that was torn down in 1982 may have been unlovely to the writer, and it was somewhat marred by bad attempts to modernize, but it was loaded with fabulous terra cotta cartouches, rosettes and scrolls. Even as late as 1982, I was able to enter the demo site afte work had finished for the day and rescue a dozen or so of these beauties.
It was necessary to bring a mallet and chisels to the debris site in order to remove hundreds of pounds of bricks and mortar that clung to the salvageable pieces before they could be moved and retrieved.
Within a few years commercial salvagers got wise to the value of preserved terra cottas and demo sites became closed & all the nice stuff carted away for resale.