Brady Street energy blends old and new

On Milwaukee's Brady Street you'll journey back to Civil War times, when construction was booming in the area and the streets were filled with immigrants, who were working the factories and tanneries. You couldn't walk down Brady Street without hearing folks arguing the price of bread in Polish, German, or in thick Irish accents. Street names in the area still bear testament to the early inhabitants of this multicultural mecca. The ethnic escalator saw the influx of Italian émigrés in the years before the Big War, and to this day many of the businesses bear the names of the Italian families that started them.

In hippie days of yore, Brady Street became a sort of counter-cultural strip. And while the 60's are over, the abundance of tattoo and body-piercing parlors, alternative clothing shops, coffee-houses and restaurants in the Brady Street neighborhood show that this is still a place where people can do their own thing and not have to care about what other people are thinking.

Brady Street today is truly the crossroads of Milwaukee, with colorful citizens from nearly every ethnic background. A walk-around neighborhood it is filled with parks, historic architecture, conveniences, specialty shops and galleries, varied and abundant night life, and some of the best eating and clothes shopping in the city. This is an area that a lucky few can call home, but anyone can enjoy. As Oscar Wilde remarked when visiting the neighborhood early in the century - "If what you want isn't on Brady Street, you probably don't need it."