Chapter 2: Race relations and retail locations
Although some African Americans had lived in Milwaukee since the city was settled in the mid-19th century, for the first several decades of the city’s history they did not make up a large demographic, typical for a Northern industrial city. This changed rapidly in the early 20th century, as cultural and economic conditions in the South worsened for blacks and the industrial cities of the North promised a solution to both, provoking the Great Migration. At this time, in the 1910s and 1920s, the urban area of Milwaukee was only a few miles across, and African Americans soon found that few parts of that small area were welcoming to them.
Discriminatory practices such as redlining, where banks and insurance companies would selectively refuse service to limit blacks to particular areas, soon became far more common in cities like Milwaukee than they had been in the Jim Crow South. One of the least restrictive neighborhoods was a predominantly Jewish area centered around Walnut Street, about two miles northwest of downtown. This area soon became home to so many African Americans that by the 1930s, referencing its residents’ brown skin, the neighborhood was christened “Bronzeville.”
Twenty years later, while developers were building expansive shopping malls on the city’s outskirts, almost every part of the landscape of Milwaukee was undergoing drastic changes of its own. Freeway construction and “urban renewal” projects, done by the state and federal government in the 1950s and 1960s, decimated Bronzeville and demolished thousands of homes and businesses, pushing African Americans into new neighborhoods nearby in the northwest, towards Capitol Court in particular. Meanwhile, thirteen miles north of downtown, the rural township of Granville was facing the gradual approach of suburban industry, creating a sudden need for modern water and sewage systems. Unable to cover these costs, the residents of western Granville Township agreed to be annexed by the city of Milwaukee in 1956, making Milwaukee’s city limits extend further out into the countryside than those of almost any other city in the United States at the time.
The demographics of Capitol Court had not yet begun to significantly change by the late 1960s, when local grocery store magnate Maxwell Kohl began planning the development that would make it obsolete. As the Milwaukee suburbs pushed further out, past places like Capital Court, Kohl saw opportunity. The Kohl family, having recently expanded their business into the Kohl’s chain of department stores, partnered with Taubman Centers, a real estate investment firm specializing in the creation of large, fully-enclosed shopping malls. Kohl’s planned to build two almost identical shopping malls, each tied for the title of the largest mall in Wisconsin. They would be located in the extreme northwestern and southwestern corners of Milwaukee’s metropolitan area, in locations where new freeways were being built, and each of them would be anchored by a new Kohl’s department store.
Southridge Mall, the first of these twins, opened its doors in 1970. Fourteen miles due north, a straight shot up 76th Street, Northridge Mall was being built in the area that would soon become unrecognizable as the former Granville Township. In the following years, marketing for Kohl’s two malls was often shared between Northridge and Southridge, and frequently emphasized the similarities between the two. Their 1983 “We’ve Got It!” series of television advertisements each featured a Northridge shopper and a Southridge shopper bickering over which mall had the better selection, ending with one mentioning a superficial difference (“Northridge has more skylights!”), showing that the two were otherwise identical.
Although the two malls were meant to be essentially identical from the very beginning, sharing most of the same stores since one person was unlikely to regularly shop at both, Northridge was in a less developed area and so Kohl was free to expand their development across 76th Street to the east. The result was two artificial lakes surrounded by upscale condominiums and apartment complexes, in a brand-new neighborhood that became known as Northridge Lakes.
When Northridge opened in 1972, it was a massive success. The mall’s extreme northern location, half a mile away from the county line, made it accessible and appealing to the residents of towns like Grafton, Cedarburg, Port Washington and West Bend – places which had never been considered part of the Milwaukee metropolis before the suburban freeways reached out to them. While the planned Milwaukee beltline freeway was never finished, the mall’s reputation was more than enough to carry customers a few extra miles on slightly inconvenient roads.
Northridge’s success was the first major blow to Capitol Court. Being significantly closer to the new mall than its other competitors, Capitol Court also had less prestige, not being near the lake (like Bayshore) or the more established suburbs to the west (like Mayfair). Still, sales there were high and Capitol Court was successfully renovated and expanded in the late 1970s.
The demographics of the area were already changing by this time, however. While home prices remained high and racial discrimination remained prevalent in the wealthier suburban municipalities, such as the lakeside area around Bayshore and the park-lined neighboring city of Wauwatosa that encompassed Mayfair, Milwaukee’s rapidly expanding African American population needed somewhere to live. The northwestern part of the city, right in between the two barriers and having fewer discriminatory practices because it was within the city of Milwaukee, was the best available place for them, and in response whites left neighborhoods such as Capitol Heights in droves.
Since the recently constructed freeways had made it much easier than ever before to live in an area like Cedarburg or West Bend and work in the city of Milwaukee, many of those whites who left the city’s north side moved there. This further elevated the status of places like Northridge, leaving Capitol Court behind. The change in Capitol Court’s reputation was rapid: as Rodriguez writes, a Boston Store department store opened in the mall in 1981 after studying the customer base and finding ample numbers of “two-income families,” but just six years later company officials stated that the mall had become “too ‘discount oriented’” – in other words, that its clientele was now mostly lower-income black shoppers – as they announced the store’s closure.
With the gradual collapse of Capitol Court, and the ongoing expansion of Milwaukee’s black population toward the north and west, Northridge became a popular shopping destination for African Americans. Being close to both the upscale but racially-exclusionary lakeside communities like River Hills and the established lower-income black neighborhoods like Capitol Heights, the Northridge area became particularly popular as a place to live for Milwaukee’s black middle class.
As the black presence at the mall grew, urban legends sprung up among the Milwaukee area’s whites. Urban legends, like any form of cultural folklore, generally serve to express the fears and moralities of their tellers. Often in modern American society, the underlying or subconscious message of these fictional tales is that black people, and the places where they tend to congregate, are dangerous and must be avoided. Popular stories claimed that unknown assailants would hide underneath cars in the mall’s parking lot with knives, waiting to stab at the ankles of random passersby. Urban legends like these helped to ensure that, although crime did increase somewhat at Northridge during the 1980s and 1990s, the perception of crime grew significantly more.
As early as the mid-1980s, these factors had subtly begun to discourage white suburbanites from shopping at Northridge. Some went out of their way to shop at other, more distant malls, including the almost identical Southridge. By 1992, however, the change in Northridge’s reputation had only just begun. Most of those who now started to fear that something bad would happen to them at the mall had not stopped shopping there, but the stage had been set for the mall’s ultimate demise.
