Bar Exam
Landmark Lanes’ Jazzy 88-Year History
Serving booze during prohibition and built by a billionaire jailbird whose son become an ambassador.
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Serving booze during prohibition and built by a billionaire jailbird whose son become an ambassador. Back to the full article.
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I recall Tuesday Import Beer Nights in the 1980s. The place would be packed and all 3 bars would be open. All imports were $2.00 at a time when Miller, Pabst and Budweiser were the beers of choice. This was also before Sprecher and Lakefront started brewing great beer. The other thing I liked about Landmark Lanes were the characters you would meet that either worked there, drank there or both. Thanks for the article about the Landmark!
I played a zillion games of pinball here when I still lived in Milwaukee. Glad to see they still have a similar number of machines.
Many thanks for this profile of the Oriental/Landmark Lanes complex. What a role it has played in keeping the surrounding neighborhood lively. Older readers will recall a similar venue downtown; the six-story Carpenter Building at the northeast corner of Sixth and Wisconsin housed the 3,000-seat Wisconsin theater, bowling lanes and a pool-hall in the basement, two restaurants, and the Wisconsin Roof dance hall on the top floor.
Thanks too for the sidebar on Moses Annenberg, now forgotten but once a presence in Milwaukee. Michael, you are off a bit on his origins; the high-minded Journal would never hire such a brawler. Moe Annenberg arrived in 1906 as the head of the Chicago News Company, a newspaper- and magazine-distributor (later named Milwaukee News Co.) backed by ten Chicago daily newspapers (!) who coveted the Milwaukee market (underserved by only six English-language, four German-language and two Polish-language dailies.)
William Randolph Hearst entered the Milwaukee market in 1917 (he bought three dailies, the Milwaukee Daily News, the Free Press, and the Evening Wisconsin and consolidated them into one paper) and made Moe Annenberg the publisher of his new Wisconsin News. Moe’s first job was to oversee the construction of the four-story News building at the southeast corner of West Water (now Plankinton) and Michigan; this building, with basement printing presses visible from the street, was, until 1962 the home of a later Hearst acquisition, the Milwaukee Sentinel.
The Annenbergs left Milwaukee on 1920 when Moe was elevated to a loftier position in the Hearst empire, but he continued to invest in Milwaukee real estate. Not only did he build the Oriental/Landmark Lanes complex, but its companion, the Tower theater at 27th and Wells, and the handsome enclosed parking garage at the southeast corner of Water and Mason.
One final link: the Wisconsin News closed down in 1939, but a small remnant of it remains in the call-letters of the paper’s radio station, WISN.
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Landmark Lanes – who hasn’t been there, and who realized that it first opened in 1927? The architecture is almost subliminal, as I never thought of it as a basement (but of course it IS!), just a unique place where people of all times gather to be together! Thanks for the well-researched article, Michael Horne!