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While “Wauwatosa” is said to mean “firefly” in a Native American language – a “fact” which is heavily debated – it might really mean “goose,” since the city has, over the years, boasted a couple iconic goose-themed houses.
While one was a sales office and later restaurant on Ludington and North – long ago moved to new digs out in Waukesha County but remembered by Tosans “of a certain age” – the other is a charming little Arts & Crafts Irish cottage-inspired house in the Olde Hillcrest neighborhood that’s been dubbed the Goose House by neighbors in more recent decades.
It is the second one, at 1850 N. 74th St., that is about to hit the market.
Listed at $550,000, the 1915, 1,918-square-foot house has three bedrooms, one full bath, one half bath and a detached two-car garage – as well as a lovely, well-tended garden – on a .38-acre lot.
You can see the full listing here.
The Goose Lady
For more than 30 years, a group of concrete geese has occupied the Hillcrest side of the yard and the geese have undergone more costume changes than Madonna on a worldwide concert tour.
"I sometimes have to laugh at the attention they get," the late owner told the Journal Sentinel nearly 25 years ago. (I have agreed not to name the owner in this article in order to help the family carry out her last wishes, and I’d ask you, kindly, to do the same if you comment.)
"People will drive by and slow down. They will bring friends who are visiting from out of town. It's not unusual for men as well as women to stop. And I have often seen high school students clean the snow off the geese or put their hats back on as they walk past."
Thus, for example, the geese have typically been gussied up for Christmas, arrayed around a Maypole in spring and adorned in stars and stripes at the Fourth of July.
The house that Tullgren built
But the geese are not the only interesting aspect of this quaint little gem of a house, which was designed by an architect for himself and his family. And if you read my work, you know I love to look at these houses that architects and builders created for their own use.
This one is especially noteworthy not only because it is the work of the firm of Martin Tullgren & Sons – whose work can be found all over the city, including the Downer Theater, the George Watts building, the Bertelson Building and the Astor Hotel, among many, many others – but because it’s the only Tullgren-designed building I’ve come across that was not credited to father Martin or son Herbert, but to son Sven Minard Tullgren.
Perhaps Minard got the credit because it was his own house, designed for himself and his wife Pansy.
Though Martin Tullgren was born in Sweden and his wife Barbara Kregness in Norway, Minard and his brother Herbert were born in Chicago (in 1887 and 1889, respectively), before the family headed west in 1894 to explore opportunities.
In the Black Hills, the elder Tullgren prospected for gold before moving to Arizona to work for Storm Cloud Mining Company and later at Homestake Mining Company, where he helped build the timber supports that held up the galleries.
The family moved back to Chicago in 1900 and two years later went north to Milwaukee, where they forged an extremely successful business, building pretty much all of the Wisconsin hotels for magnate Walter Schroeder (except Milwaukee's Hilton), many apartment buildings, retail developments, theaters and more.
In 1909 – the same year that Martin left his partnership with Archibald Hood and went into business with his sons – Minard married Iowa-born Pansy Ethel Paull and they couple moved back out west to Corvallis, Montana, where the census notes that he was an architect working in the fruit farming business.
By 1914, they were back in the Milwaukee area and it would appear that they may have been living with Pansy’s parents, Harvey and Eunice at 341 Second Ave. in Wauwatosa.
In August of that year, they had purchased a corner lot at Second Avenue and East Center Street – now North 74th Street and Hillcrest Avenue – from Hawks Nursery Co. and planned to “start to build at once,” according to the Wauwatosa News.
The house they built is basically what we see today, although an old porch out back was enclosed to become a sun room and the south wing of the house was also extended to the east at some point. This is obvious not only from the fact that the flooring changes at an arch in the room there but also because the extension sits atop unexcavated earth.
While the house has a homey feel, with a nice living room fireplace – perhaps it is in this space that Pansy hosted her numerous club meetings (which often made the pages of the Wauwatosa News) – but it’s also more spacious than it seems.
But the most striking room – which feels like the kind of statement you’d expect in a main entry hall – is at the back of the house, facing the backyard. Here there is dark wood wainscoting wrapping around a fireplace and there is both a unique long and narrow skylight along the east wall and just below it two long narrow windows – since painted over – that would’ve let in more light and which could also be opened for air.
This space shouts library or study and it’s easy to picture Minard in here working on drawings for his firm’s many projects.
However, the Tullgrens didn’t stay too long in the house they’d built just up the block from Pansy’s parents, perhaps because with sons Paull (spelled like his mother's maiden name) and Harvey arriving in 1915 and 1920, they’d begun to outgrow the place.
In 1921 – when Minard was vice president of the family firm – he and Pansy – sold the house and moved to Downer Avenue.
In May 1925, with the arrival of daughter Barbara just a couple weeks away, the Tullgrens bought a 2 1/4-acre piece of land in the Town of Grafton from Ferd C. Mintzlaff and ran it as a stock farm.
During this time, Minard was extremely active in the Ozaukee Country Club, where he was vice president.
In May 1927, Minard was badly injured at the site of a hotel being constructed in Manitowoc. Falling 18 feet down a shaft, he broke both ankles, and perhaps it is for this reason that the family moved again not long after. Running a farm and an architecture business in this condition couldn’t have been easy.
In May 1928, the family, which now also included daughter Pansy, moved to Farwell Avenue in Shorewood. But soon after, Minard began to feel ill with what he and his friends and family thought was acute indigestion on the golf course at Ozaukee Country Club.
Though he seemed to be on the mend, in late August he died at home of an apparent heart attack. He was just 41.
Pansy not only was left to raise four children alone, but she also stepped into her late husband’s role as vice president of Herbert W. & S. Minard Tullgren Inc. (their father Martin had passed away in 1922, leading to the name change). However, the company appears to have ceased operations by the end of the 1930s and the Art Deco headquarters designed in 1937 for Badger Mutual Insurance appears to be the firm's final major project.
For a time Pansy would move to California to live near her mother-in-law Barbara Tullgren – Paull graduated from Hollywood High during this period – but ultimately returned to Wauwatosa. Her daughter Barbara, after high school, got into designing dresses but came to the attention of John Powers in New York City and became a successful model, doing shoots for Coty and magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
Modeling svengali Powers predicted, “she will become more popular than my most famous models to date because she has a fresh charm and is unsophisticated.”
Barbara, living in New York, was excited that, “Now I’ll be able to do all the swell things for mother that I always dreamed about.”
Back at the old house
Back at the house the Tullgrens had built in Tosa, it seems that owners came and went.
Among them were, in the 1920s, Fred Krueck and his wife Florence and by the early 1930s, real estate man George F. Bond and his wife Erna.
In the mid-1930s, the house was occupied by Henry Fuldner and his wife Alice, who would’ve been no stranger to the Tullgrens.
Alice’s parents – Edward Kearney, co-founder of Kearney & Trecker, and Ella Birdine Morton also lived on the same block of Second Avenue where the Tullgrens built their house, but where Pansy lived with her parents.
In fact, the year the Tullgrens married (1909) in Pansy’s parents house is the same year Alice was born to her parents living just a few doors down. Young Alice would’ve been growing up directly across the street from the Tullgrens in their Arts & Crafts cottage.
Alice married Fuldner in 1933 and appears to have moved across the street within the next few years, staying until 1946, when they moved up to Marietta Avenue on Milwaukee’s East Side.
In ‘46, Donald Ivins, who worked at Miller Brewing Co., moved in with his wife Vera and their son Donald Jr. and three years later, Western Metal Specialty Co. VP Robert Wilson and his wife Blanche replaced them there.
Even after Wilson’s death, Blanche stayed in the house until 1972, at which point tile setter Robert Barlament and his wife Lois lived there until 1979, when AC Corp. engineer Lloyd Soley and his wife Carol occupied it for about six years.
The Soleys must have been interested in the history of their new house as they located Paull Tullgren and sent him a note asking about it and previous owners.
While Tullgren, who wrote back on Feb. 11, 1980 on stationery from his Mountain Home, Arkansas-based real estate appraisal business, couldn't say who lived there since his family left in 1921, he did have some details about the place.
"I remember each house we ever lived in," he wrote, "and there were 11 before I married and left home. From what I can remember, the exterior looks just as it has forever except I guess perhaps the garage has been rebuilt or at least remodeled to accomodate newer and much larger cars. When we moved from the house in 1921 we had an Essex.
"You asked about light fixtures," Tullgren continued. "I asked my mother, who is now 92 and sharp as a tack, about a few things. She said the light fixtures were made for the house by a Milwaukee craftsman, whose name she has forgotten. They were of the Gustave Stickley style.
"All of the furniture was original Gustave Stickley I presume in what was called at the time Fumed Oak. A sort of golden tone and very fashionable at the time. These included all of the living room, dining room and one bedroom set. It all got away from us throught the years, as it went out of style. I still have a libary desk with a tip down front, which I prize very highly, the only piece that is left."
Tullgren also recalled that the house originally had a wood shingle roof.
Since 1986-7, the house has had the same owner, who, fortunately, kept the Tullgren letter, though the wood shingle roof has long since been replaced.
It was that owner that extensively landscaped the yard around 1996 and added the beloved geese.
As for those geese, the owner said that while visiting a sister living in Toledo many years ago she noticed that in Ohio and Michigan it was a trend to dress up decorative yard geese.
Realtor Sarah Breuer-Rappold – who lives nearby – recalls that she met and became friends with the so-called “Goose Lady” while walking past as she accompanied her kids to and from school when they were little.
One can only hope whoever buys this Olde Hillcrest gem of a home will get to keep the geese and the bins of outfits – there are well over 100 of them – so they may carry on the tradition.
Read more Urban Spelunking stories about Milwaukee’s history, architecture and urban landscape here.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press. A fifth collects Urban Spelunking articles about breweries and maltsters.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has been heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.