April 4, 2013

MILWAUKEE - “Take a trip back in time and experience Milwaukee between the world wars.” So states an invitation, extended through promotional literature from the new Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear.

Built in the Italianate mode as a single-family home in 1869, the edifice was renovated into a German Renaissance Revival style duplex in 1906 and later harbored a doctor’s clinic, boarding house and office space for philanthropic attorney-realtor Avrum “Abe” Chudnow.

Now, the sizable structure at 839 N. 11th St. houses the late Chudnow’s extensive collection of everything from vintage toys and games, to kitchen and office equipment and to campaign buttons bearing state icons  William Proxmire and Frank Zeidler.

All told, perhaps 1,000 items are on display at the CMY, Executive Director Steve Daily said. Formerly with the Milwaukee County Historical Society, Daily and CMY curator Joel Willems were interviewed at the museum recently.

The two are CMY’s only paid employees and joke that they function as janitors, as well as administrators. Local college history students act as interns; among their duties is cataloguing some of the Chudnow collection’s estimated 250,000 pieces, a portion of which will be added to artifacts now displayed. The cataloguing could take another decade, Daily guessed.

Classification of artifacts began several years ago, with Abe Chudnow’s hiring of Wisconsin Lutheran College history graduate Willems.

“He wanted an assistant to help him catalogue the collection,” Willems explained. “He wanted to exhibit it here, at his place.” Chudnow also wanted the collection kept intact, the curator said, providing funds to that end. The CMY is a nonprofit organization whose board of directors consists of Chudnow’s daughter and three sons.

Collecting, it seems, was in Abe Chudnow’s blood. The Milwaukee-born and bred alumnus of North Division High School and Marquette Law School was the son of a junk peddler who plied his trade in a horse-drawn wagon (precursor of the Chudnow Iron & Metal firm). Born in 1913, Abe Chudnow lived into his 90s. He visited scrap yards, as well as stores, to enhance his eclectic collection.

The attorney-realtor’s CMY legacy is remindful of the Milwaukee Public Museum’s permanent “Streets of Old Milwaukee” exhibit a few blocks to the east of the Chudnow Museum. As on those “Streets,” mannequins watch over segments of the Chudnow collection. CMY visitors encounter a uniformed train porter, a menacing-looking bartender and Sen. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette (for whom a new head is reportedly being fashioned in Hollywood by a prop man buddy of Daily’s). Unlike the “Streets,” where the visitor typically views artifacts through windows, one “can walk into all the rooms” which display memorabilia at the CMY, Willems said. “More of an immersion type of thing,” he added.

What about the CMY’s emphasis on the 1920s and ‘30s?

That period was “Milwaukee’s golden time,” Daily said, a time when “sewer socialism” and then-Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan (who gave his name to that landmark bridge of today) held sway in the city.

“The ‘20s and ‘30s was really a dynamic time for Milwaukee and the whole country,” Daily continued, as he led a reporter on a tour of CMY. “This was a time of change,” a time when “the rise of labor-saving devices (like electric vacuum cleaners) freed up women;” a time when women’s fashions were changing notably and the car was replacing the train as the transportation mode of choice; a time when European immigration continued, but Milwaukee was experiencing an “identity shift from (being) the most German city in America.”

That time is reflected by two maple-floored stories of display rooms at the CMY. Among other exhibits are a toy room, grocery store, ice cream parlor, barbershop, train depot and bookstore-fronted speakeasy (it was the age of Prohibition, after all).

In keeping with the contemporary notion of a museum, the first floor contains a gift shop. The second floor boasts a theater with seating for about 20; audiences for lectures and films can readily spill over into an adjoining room. Public lectures are being delivered about once a month, on Wisconsin-related topics, by area historians. Classic movies are being screened approximately monthly, as well. Slated for late April will be a talk about a Milwaukee County Ku Klux Klan connection some nine decades ago, plus “And Then There Were None,” a film based on an Agatha Christie mystery.

Daily, who specialized in archival management while earning his history master’s degree at Marquette, cited Eagle’s Old World Wisconsin and Janesville’s Tallman House as personal favorites among established Badger state museums. Of the CMY, which opened last August, he said, “For Milwaukee, I think this is truly a unique experience.”

As to whether live costumed guides might one day supplement the mannequins, the push button-activated recordings and the interpretive panels that dot the CMY’s display areas at present, Daily smiled and said, “I think anything’s possible.”

At a glance

What: Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear.

Where: 839 N. 11th St., in downtown  Milwaukee.  Ample street parking and limited offstreet parking are available. Notable neighbor: historically significant former Masonic temple, now unoccupied, next door to the south.

When: Open for guided or self-directed tours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. Also open occasionally for moderately priced evening lectures and classic film screenings - with exhibit-viewing opportunities.

Cost: Adults are $5 tours, seniors and school-aged youngsters are $4, and children under 6 are free. A family rate of $10 applies on Sundays. As for visiting senior citizens, “A lot of them really get talking” over the artifacts, according to CMY Executive Director Steve Daily. “It kind of sparks those reminiscences, if you will.”

Who’s Who: In January, the CMY was the site of a reception at which nearly 50 Milwaukeeans welcomed the Chicago-based French consul. (In the planning stage: a “Bootleggers’ Ball” fundraiser, featuring appetizers, cocktails and perhaps costumes that evoke the prohibition era.)

Contact: 414-273-1680 or www.chudnowmuseum.org.