Under a recent plan, the trio of buildings that formed Swan Furniture and Interiors, 7487 Harwood Ave. in the heart of Wauwatosa Village, would’ve been torn down and replaced with a quartet of townhouses.
While the multi-story development is still slated to occur on a parking lot south of the site, some of the Swan buildings will now not only survive, but be renovated for use as a wedding and events venue.
That’s because instead of selling the buildings to Mandel Group – which is developing Harlow & Hem with 157 mixed-income apartments on five floors – the owners of Swan, which closed in 2020, decided to sell their buildings to Nat Davauer, who owns the neighboring Draft & Vessel.
Davauer bought the property last July for $725,000.
Instead of clearing the site – which consists of a house, a chapel constructed for a funeral home and a single-story retail addition – Davauer is keeping all but the house, which was heavily damaged in a fire, and creating a wedding and events venue.
The house will come down and be replaced with either a sunken beer garden within the walls of the home’s basement, or else the basement will be capped and used for storage and a patio will sit on top.
There will also be off-street parking for the food trucks that serve Draft & Vessel.
“Right now we’ve got to park (food trucks) on the street and it's hard to save parking and our neighbors don't like it and it's just not the best,” Davauer says, adding that buying and saving the property allows Draft & Vessel to preserve its view of the western sky for its outdoor customers.
“Watching that sunset over the medical complex is really premium,” he says. “With this new expanded outdoor beer garden pergola space, similar to what we have behind (Draft & Vessel) – (the view from) which is going to be somewhat compromised by the Mandel development – we can still sit out front and look toward the sunset.”
Some ungraceful additions will be removed from the chapel – which is a beautiful space with church-like Gothic windows and a vaulted ceiling with tracery – allowing Davauer to re-open the now-blocked windows to the benefits from their southern exposure.
The exterior will be restored to remove brown paint from its stone facade.
“The horrific brown paint on the outside,” says Davauer, shaking his head. “Who thought that was a good idea? You'll notice they use different shades of brown every time they touched up. So there's five different browns. We want to get that down to the original stone.”
The later, low retail addition will get an exterior refresh that will match Draft & Vessel’s exterior, Davauer says.
“This was a funeral home and the people who ran it lived in this house, and you'll be able to see in the basement, (the buildings) are connected in an interesting, weird maze-like way,” Davauer says.
“And then on this corner, (Scott) Swan said it was like an old school car repair shop. Then that was built up I’m guessing in the ‘60, and then they kind of all meet inside somewhere.”
While Swan, and consequently Davauer, believed the chapel to be among the oldest buildings in the Village, it isn’t even the oldest in the complex. That honor belongs to the house, which faces Harwood Avenue.
Although the City of Wauwatosa has no records pertaining to the construction of any of the buildings, the house is clearly shown on the 1894 and 1910 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps ... it is, in both cases, alone on the site, which suggests the chapel came later.
And that would fit with the general timeline I was able to piece together from other sources.
A year after the latter of the Sanborns, a funeral home did indeed open at the house, and it would make sense, then, that the chapel would have been built at some point in or after 1911.
The funeral home was owned by Charles Brigden, who was born in 1868 in Chatham Valley, Pennsylvania, to parents hailing from the Finger Lakes area of New York.
Brigden’s father was a lawyer and the family was well-off enough to have two young domestics in the house to help care for Charles and his three siblings.
At some point between 1880 and 1896, the family moved to Oconto, Wisconsin, and by 1905, Charles was in Milwaukee, married to Dora Arnold and with a family of their own.
In the meantime, in 1901 he’d been part of a group that wrote the first Wisconsin exam for a state undertaker’s license and the following year he became a partner in the Milwaukee Street funeral home of Canadian-born undertaker Robert W. Patterson.
In 1908, Brigden was joined in the business by his son Hobart – who had attended Wauwatosa High School – and together, in 1911, they opened the Wauwatosa funeral home, while also maintaining the Milwaukee Street location of Patterson & Bridgden.
During World War I, Hobart served in the U.S. Naval Hospital Corps, though not as an undertaker but as a pharmacist’s mate.
In 1923, the Milwaukee Street location moved to Van Buren Street and in 1927, a year after Dora’s passing, Charles retired, selling his half of the business to Hobart, who soon moved it to 43rd and Lloyd Streets.
In 1929, the house was altered to accommodate Cornelius L. Benoy's printing company, which published the Wauwatosa News.
In 1932, the house was still occupied by Benoy and his print shop, along with commercial artist Donald G. McDonald.
Just outside their windows, on the corner of the lot facing Wauwatosa Avenue (called North 75th Street then), was Edward Young’s Wauwatosa Tire and Battery Service. It’s unclear which, if any of these businesses were occupying the chapel.
A few years later in 1936, Kenneth Baxter had converted the auto shop into Baxter’s Service Station and the house was occupied by a Mrs. Helen E. Wright, the offices of chiropractors Bader & Vasby and Frank Stattmann’s upholstery studio, the first furniture business on the site.
The chapel, in the meantime, had been converted into the ET Restaurant, run by Robert Laack and Walter Seefeldt.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Millie Wright (presumably a relation of Helen's) was living in the house and Stattmann was still doing business there, along with tailor Sami York. The service station was under the purview of Arthur Voss and the restaurant space was now home to Frank Passmann’s produce business.
By later in the decade, Paula Grunewald’s Harwood Village Beauty Studio and Dunn & Stringer Investment Co. real estate were in the house, and Arthur Schmidt’s Village Sea Food House delicatessen occupied the chapel (though soon after it would move to 68th and Milwaukee, where there is now a CPA’s office).
Early in the 1950s, Grunewald’s beauty shop shared the house with dressmaker Velma Sarinski (later replaced by optometrist Alfred Bartowitz) and electrical contractor J. I. Cronin occupied the chapel.
But sometime in (or soon after) 1952, William and Marie (nee Martin) Swan’s furniture business arrived on the scene.
While a 1980 obituary for Swan says that he moved the business – which was started in 1949 in Elm Grove – to Tosa in 1950, city directories do not back that up.
While the business is not listed in the 1952 city directory for Wauwatosa, a newspaper ad the following year shows Swan at the Harwood & Wauwatosa site.
Swan was born in Chicago and moved to Milwaukee as a child, later graduating from Washington High School.
He owned the interiors business until 1966, when he sold it to his son Peter. When Peter passed away in 1985, his widow Suzie and then son Scott took over.
The business was a Tosa Village fixture for nearly 70 years and was well-known throughout the area.
Its showrooms wound through the chapel, the corner building (whose construction date, like the dates of the other structures, is unknown) and the basement of the house. In one of them there was a gurgling fountain. In another there was shag carpeting. Near the office were stacks and stacks of fabric sample books.
Later, the lower level of the chapel building – called the Swan Cellar – was converted into WhimsiKidz hair salon for kids by Scott’s sister Heidi Mikich (it is now on 117th and North).
Apparently, at some point, there was a hardwood floor showroom down there, Davauer posits, as he points out the fancy floors, which he believes were used as samples for interested customers.
Who covered up the windows in the chapel, or for how long they were boarded up on the inside and outside, is unclear.
But, that’s in the past, because now – along with the hidden hardwood floors – they’re coming back.
“It’s kind of circling back to a prior life,” says Davauer, a former wedding photographer. “The chapel is a 40-, 50-person wedding venue that couldn’t have a better sort of scale and experience for a small boutique wedding.
“The (single-story) section is attached in a way that is perfect for weddings. You have the ceremony in the chapel and come over here for cocktail hour, while you turn over the chapel and bring out the tables. Two hours later you're back in the chapel seated for dinner.”
The former Swan Cellar space below has space for bride and groom rooms and they will connect directly to the chapel once Davauer reopens an existing staircase that was closed off.
There’s also space to convert to bathrooms.
“Weddings are normally Saturday or whatever,” says Davauer. “That's six more days that we can do whatever we want to do: concerts, events, beer tasting, beer pairing (dinners), any type of pop-up. We're doing these pop-up thrift sales down in Walker’s Point right now that are great.
“We have Tosa Fest, we have the bike races, we have Art 64 coming up soon; a lot of events right here on this street. If we can feed them with a great event space during those big village-wide events, we see a lot of symbiosis there.”
That's to say nothing of the hundreds of apartments that are expected to come online next door and directly across the street in the coming couple years. And, says Davauer, the demand for events at Draft & Vessel has already skyrocketed, leading him to expand the available space there.
“One of the reasons this is so appealing is we expanded our event space, which is kind of semi-attached to take over our little bottle shop to make a larger event space,” he explains. “Since we've done that, it's just gotten more and more and more popular for 30-, 40-person events: birthday parties, showers. It's perfect. It's getting booked basically every weekend of the year.
“We see the demand and we know what we can sell. And what we can sell is an environment that is high attention to detail in a great small scale experience, and this is just adding to that.”
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.
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 be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
