The Apartments Built Over a Ship

Future Cream City Lofts at 170 S. 2nd St. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Rent at Joseph Property Development‘s Cream City Lofts comes with a free conversation starter. A couple of them actually.

Joseph has nearly completed its redevelopment of the four-story building at 170 S. 2nd St. in Walker’s Point into a 40-unit apartment complex.

The structure was originally developed by George Burnham, one of the original purveyors of Cream City bricks, in 1873 for hardware store owner John Nazro.

But the structure’s story is as much about what’s under it as what’s in it.

Twenty feet below the building, according in part to an 1874 report, rests the hull of the wrecked schooner Cincinnati.

The steamship collided with the S.S. Milwaukie and was stripped for pieces before being dumped on what is today solid ground. But to create that ground, the ship had to have layers of oak ties laid atop it, mixed with layers of sand and cement. A three-layer stone foundation separates the structure from the supposed ship.

That same 1874 report, written in a boosterish style, notes that Nazro’s new hardware store was “the largest hardware store in the world” when completed. Its location was just a couple blocks from the now-long-gone Milwaukee Union Depot railroad station.

Back in its hardware store days, the building was touted as being capable of storing one million cubic feet of goods. “Fitted and furnished in a manner making it the most elegant and commodious hardware store in the country,” wrote S. Compton Smith in the 19th-century magazine. Smith reported that Nazro did $1.25 million in business in 1873 which adjusted for inflation would be approximately $29 million today.

Nazro left the building in 1878 and sold his hardware store by 1880 after which it became a cigar factory, machine shop, department store and ultimately Downtown Mini Warehouse in 1980.

The firm secured historic preservation tax credits and is working to restore the building to its former glory. Much of that work involved demolishing the interior storage units. “It was a fairly substantial demo project,” said developer Robert Joseph in a 2020 interview with Urban Milwaukee.

The demolition work yielded another surprise: intact advertising for former tenant Smith Supply Group, which used the bricked-in window bays for hand-painted advertisements of its merchandise.

Two of the window advertisements remain on the exterior.

Joseph serves as its own in-house general contractor. Miller Architectural Group is leading the project’s design. The redevelopment was first announced in 2019.

If you’re in the market for a studio, one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment in a building with classic conversation pieces, the Cream City Lofts leasing website is now live.

When the building is completed this spring it will include a rooftop deck, fitness center and club room. Two-story townhouse units will be included on the building’s first floor and a mezzanine level. Parking will be included in the building’s basement and a portion of the first floor.

As they have been for decades, Burnham’s cream-colored bricks that form the building’s facade are covered in paint. But unlike the storage facility’s choice of white, Joseph has opted for a blue-and-cream color scheme.

For more on Milwaukee’s hardware store history, see our 2016 Yesterday’s Milwaukee column.

Photos

2019 Photos

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article referred to the Cincinnati as “SS” it was a schooner, not a steamship.