Alexander Mitchell’s architectural legacy goes beyond the handsome office (Mitchell Building) and mansion (the Wisconsin Club) we discussed in the last post. In 1879, Mitchell commissioned E.T. Mix to build the Mackie Building adjacent to the Mitchell Building on E. Michigan Street. As is obvious from the inscription on the façade, this five-story office building originally housed the Milwaukee Chamber of Congress. Ever the consummate businessman, Mitchell had desired a suitably dignified meeting place for Milwaukee’s merchants. Nowhere was his artistic endeavor more lavish than in the Grain Exchange Room, the trading room where merchants bought and sold the harvests of the Upper Midwest during Milwaukee’s brief but memorable reign as wheat market to the world.
The 1870s-1880s have been called America’s Gilded Age, and the Grain Exchange Room is living witness to the sumptuousness commercialists could marshal forth in what was ostensibly a place of business. The upper walls are covered with murals depicting Greek deities, most prominently Demeter, the goddess of grain, opposite the main door of the hall. Three large framed paintings hanging on the lower wall feature a busy port city, a country scene where farmers are harvesting grain, and an Indian village. The center of the spacious three-story hall was the trading pit where the merchants set the price of wheat. Originally the pit consisted of an octagonal raised platform with descending steps on the inside where merchants would sit while bidding on grain. An engraved octagonal wooden section of floor still marks the pit’s former location.
The Mackie Building is testimony to the beneficial results of historical restoration. Milwaukee ceased to be the hub of the American grain trade in the late 1800s and the exchange was closed in the mid-1930s (the author of this post knows an elderly Milwaukeean who was employed by the Grain Exchange at the time). For several decades in the mid-1900s a low ceiling divided the multi-story Grain Exchange Room into several floors of offices, but starting in 1979 Conrad Schmitt Studios restored the room to its former splendor on behalf of then-owner Mrs. Charles Ashley. The current owners of the Mackie Building, First MKD, intend to use the Grain Exchange as a banquet hall for the new hotel they are developing in the nearby Loyalty Building. Presently the room can be rented out for weddings and other functions courtesy of Bartolotta’s Catering.
Sources:
I would like to thank Bartolotta’s Catering for permitting me to photograph inside the Grain Exchange Room, as well as Robert Schram for bringing this part of Milwaukee’s history to my attention.
Ackerman, Sandra. Milwaukee Then and Now (San Diego, CA: Thunder Bay Press, 2004), p. 56-57.
Gurda, John. The Making of Milwaukee (Brookfield, WI: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 2000), p. 112.
Comments