Bay View, Milwaukee

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Home of Beulah Brinton, an early community figure

Bay View is a neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, south of the downtown area and north of the City of St. Francis. The original Village of Bay View is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Bay View Historic District. According to the designation, it is roughly bounded by Lake Michigan to the east, Meredith Street to Superior, up to Nock Street and then from Wentworth Avenue to Pryor Avenue.

Although the neighborhood boundaries of Bay View have grown over the years as more and more people identify with it, the specific boundaries given by the Milwaukee Neighborhood Identification Project are: along the border of Lake Michigan, south of Jones Island, from Lincoln Avenue to the north and Howell Avenue to the west, south to Morgan Avenue changing to Oklahoma Avenue heading east.

[edit] History

The first permanent European settlement of the Bay View area was in 1834; Horace Chase, future Milwaukee mayor, is credited as the first permanent settler[1]. In 1855, the Green Bay, Milwaukee and Chicago Rail Road established its first Milwaukee-area depot in Bay View. In 1868, the Milwaukee Iron Company opened a plant in the area, and Bay View was established as a company town. By 1879, Bay View had a population of 2,592, and incorporated as a village, on approx 1.4 sq. mi. of land. By 1886, Bay View had became a center of workers' rights activism, the culmination of which was the Bay View Tragedy. A year later, the village's approximately 4,000 residents voted overwhelmingly to be annexed to the city of Milwaukee, becoming the city's 17^th ward and ending the community's independent identity. Thenceforth, the village has been a Milwaukee neighborhood.