Blog: The value of the Sydney Hih

Starting today and lasting into September, Milwaukee arts group IN:SITE will feature installations throughout the Park East Corridor, a 64-acre patch of urban land ripe for renewal ever since the Park East Freeway was torn down in 2002. Missteps and foot-dragging left the corridor barren until 2006, when construction on The Flatiron, a condo development, finally began. Promises of locating the Harley-Davidson Museum, a theater complex, and other entertainment centers ultimately fell flat, and the majority of this prized land remains unused.

The main attraction of IN:SITE’s plans for the corridor will be a week of events from Aug. 23 to 30, when the fabled 19th-century Sydney Hih building will be open to the public and serve as an information center and museum. The Sydney Hih is a natural hub for the art project: Slated for sale since well before the freeway came down, the building today stands a defiant monument against thoughtless redevelopment. While the specter of a wrecking ball has loomed over the Sydney Hih from the ’60s—when the Park East went up—through today, plans have repeatedly failed to bloom. It’s as though the building has an invisible force field, repelling all who dare tear it down.

I think that force is the collective spirit of the artists and musicians who had studios in the building for decades. Milwaukee bands of yore like Wild Kingdom and The Frogs practiced there. The basement once housed Milwaukee’s well-loved club The Unicorn, which booked Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins back in the ’90s. Upstairs, Milwaukee’s underground arts scene flourished for decades. Without trying, the Sydney Hih was long an epicenter for street-level arts in Milwaukee.

I was lucky enough to be in a band that rented space there in the summer of 2000. At the time, the exterior still boasted its strange and colorful squares, Gus’ Mexican Cantina had not yet moved, and Betty’s Bead Bank was still slinging beads. Inside, the labyrinthine passageway through the four buildings that make up the Sydney Hih lead up stairs, then down, then through some turns—all the while past walls of graffiti art and scrawled messages from the past.

Our room was small, but it had a loft and a view of Third Street, and we inherited a few objects from the previous tenants: a guitar stand, a speaker, an antique drill press that was larger than me, and a copy of The Little Red Book. As a band, we loved being there, and practiced almost nightly. We attended parties in different rooms, and peaked into others out of curiosity. (The room next door contained a bar and a wheelchair.) The thought of a world without the Sydney Hih breaks my heart.

It reminds me of the time my mom attempted to give me a tour of her childhood haunts. Among the buildings we set out to see were her grandparents’ house on 24th Place and the Third Ward spot where her mother’s family had owned a coffee-roasting company. But the buildings were all gone. Knowing her childhood home in Oconomowoc was also gone, it struck me that nearly every artifact of her childhood has disappeared. There’s no museum of her youth, no uneasy gaze at a former residence, wondering who lives there now. Her past simply no longer exists in tangible form.

Of course some buildings have to be demolished and new ones built. And of course we can’t keep every structure purely for some nostalgic sense of security. An individual’s personal history is not particularly moving to anybody else, and when a building is torn down, few people tear up. But what if that building holds meaning for a community of people? Anyone who’s never seen the inside of the Sydney Hih should stop by in August, and then hope that any new redevelopment plans that come along honor its colorful heritage.