Today’s post draws on research from the superb Mimi Bird Collection and the Milwaukee Journal archives. If you haven’t already, you need to check out/follow the work being done by the Historic WFB page on Facebook. Additional recommended reading includes “Historic Whitefish Bay: A Celebration of Architecture and Character” by Jefferson Aikin and Thomas Fehring
With the village of Whitefish Bay currently weighing plans to replace the aging warming house at Klode Park, it felt like the right moment to revisit the park’s surprisingly contentious beginnings and how a dispute over the first warming house ended up in court nearly a century ago.
The story starts with a political maneuver that would feel right at home in a Netflix drama.
In 1928, the village set out to acquire the lakefront land that would become Klode Park. The seller? Frank C. Klode, the village president himself. State law prohibits (now, as it did then) elected officials from potential transactions that may include significant conflicts of interest, such as selling land directly to the village you represent, so a workaround was engineered: Klode resigned, a fellow trustee stepped up as interim president long enough to complete the transaction, and then promptly stepped back down so Klode could reclaim his seat. The park was named after him shortly after.
The Milwaukee Journal didn’t let it slide quietly. In a February 1929 editorial, the paper noted that the village, then a community of only about 4,000 people and rapidly growing, had agreed to pay $103,000 (roughly $2 million today) for the property with virtually no public discussion and no open board session before the deal was done. The Journal pointedly wondered whether suburban governments were really as close to the people as they liked to claim.
Mimi Bird, whose meticulous historical collection is one of the great treasures of Whitefish Bay, apparently had her own feelings on the naming of the park. She left a candid handwritten note about it in her records.
The controversy didn’t end with the purchase. Over the next two years, the park’s first warming house, referred to in the newspapers of the day as a “comfort station”, became its own source of conflict. Neighboring property owners S.L. Crolius and Adolph Lotter sued over the building’s location at the southern end of the park, arguing it would depreciate their property values by 25 to 35 percent. It’s worth noting that Klode’s own home sat at the northern end of the park, well away from the disputed site.
The case was eventually settled. The village agreed that after the 1930-31 skating season, the original structure would come down and a new one would be built closer to the center of the park, a compromise that put some distance between the building and the complaining neighbors. In what was likely no coincidence, the old structure was demolished in March 1931 the day before a village trustee election in which several candidates were running explicitly on an “anti-Klode”, “anti-administration” platform. Whether the timing was strategic or serendipitous, it made for tidy politics.
The park that caused so much fuss in its beginning days has been drawing people to the lakefront ever since. Nearly a century later, as the village considers what comes next for the warming house, it’s a good reminder that even the most beloved community spaces often have a complicated story behind them.
