Within a block were such families as the Balistrieris, the Aliotos, the Librizzis, and others, living next to each other on Brady Street. Apparently this grocery store was at least in part a legitimate enterprise during Prohibition, even though the neighborhood was active in the production of wine, mostly originating in the basements of the numerous Sicilians who had moved there from their homeland, after a stint in the Third Ward. On New Year’s Eve, 1930, a fire broke out in the building, and owner Josephine Bellanti was ordered to “replace girders wrecked in fire.” That was done by February, 1931. Meanwhile, the store on the corner kept butchering and producing.
The automotive use at the location was permitted according to the city’s first zoning code, enacted the year before. The automobile age was soon to displace the horse-and-buggy era here, although thousands of horses were still stabled within the city limits, sometimes rather noxiously close to houses and grocery stores. Toward the end of 1921 he took out a permit to tear down an old barn to the south and to erect a 28-foot by 52-foot garage at a cost of $2,700. Arnol and his wife, Anna, ran the place and lived upstairs, as was customary with such mom-and-pop mercantile operations of the era. Arnapaloky, or maybe Arnapolsky, or who knows what? (It’s a devil reading old handwritten city records.) Anyway, the butcher simply called his store “Charles Arnol Grocers,” and left it at that.Ĭhas. In 1921 the store was run by a fellow named Chas. In 1912 we find Paul Pietluch (if that’s how his name was spelled) running the place located in what had become by then a rather prominent and busy intersection, just as had been predicted nearly two decades before. Neighbors to the south, on the block the paper called “one of the most attractive bits of street in Milwaukee,” included such names as Bradley, Skinner, Watson, Martin and Fitzgerald. “East side people in the vicinity think it will benefit them,” the article wrote, anticipating a “marked increase in business near the corner of Brady and Van Buren,” where Herman Gross ran his grocery store in the new building. That was soon to change a couple of years later when the first Holton Viaduct spanned the Milwaukee River from its launching pad just to the north.Ī June, 1894 Milwaukee Journal article looked forward to the opening of the new bridge, the completion of which was delayed by some months. At that time, Brady and Van Buren was just another intersection on the lower east side. Brady St. It was constructed in 1890 as a store at what had then been 846 Van Buren St. The older and larger of the two is the two-story corner structure at 707 E. Hybrid occupies two buildings as its cocktail campus. Changing times in an ever-changing neighborhood, and in a society where a “gay bar” might some day be any bar. That makes the nearly six year old Hybrid - the newest gay bar in the city - the oldest bar on the block.
Was Originally a Butcher Shop and Grocery Store Today, Libby’s is closed, replaced with Van Buren’s Whiskey Bar, and Angelo’s is being remodeled, and will reopen under the ownership of Fried, who has since bought out his partner. To the south were Angelo’s and Libby’s, each of which had been in business for decades. Van Buren streets at the foot of the Edward D. It was located in an old building at the southeast corner of E. The opportunity to open the Hybrid came for Nate Fried and Bill Lison with the closing of Dancing Ganesha Restaurant in 2007. The nearest spot, the venerable This Is It, was still a good hike downtown. Meanwhile, the target audience included a growing population in the Brady Street – East Side areas consisting of folks who perhaps did not care to travel a couple of miles for a congenial tavern. It was not long ago that gay-friendly establishments (as we call them now) were generally concentrated in a small, then-unpopulated area of the city’s post-industrial near South Side. The name itself alludes to the changes that have occurred in society and in the gay tavern business in recent years. Established in 2010, Hybrid Lounge is the newest - and perhaps last to ever open - of Milwaukee’s gay bars.