Aerial view of Garden Homes development as it was being developed about 1923. The area has suffered with many distressed homes including the home of Milwaukee's former mayor Emil Seidel. The Seidel home was part of a progressive housing project in the 1920s and is today an abandoned, board-up in a struggling neighborhood. Credit: Milwaukee Public Library

Mary Louise Schumacher Art City An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue. SHARE Photo of Emil Seidel, the first socialist mayor of Milwaukee, from 1932. “It’s a different world here,” said Joe Bova, a longtime activist who has lived in the Garden Homes since 1970. “We have a gem, this jewel. This is something that is really important not just for us and our neighbors but, if you step back, this is one of the more important areas in Milwaukee.” Rick Wood “I will be here until the end,” said Bernice Love, who has lived in the Garden Homes since 1969 and supported the designation. “This is a place that we love. It’s different in its design.” She stands in front of the former home of Milwaukee Mayor Emil Seidel, who in the early 1920's developed the Garden Homes Neighborhood as a project for affordable housing. Rick Wood Related Photos The historic Garden Homes Neighborhood

The historic Garden Homes Neighborhood The resilient Garden Homes Neighborhood

Emil Seidel, the city's and nation's first socialist mayor, believed so strongly in a utopian vision for affordable housing that he moved into one of the housing projects he championed.

Surrounded by rural land and built in the early 1920s, the Garden Homes project was an alternative to the crush of tenement living and the filthy factory air that suffocated Milwaukee's downtown.

Today, Seidel's two-story house with a barrel-vaulted porch is boarded up and abandoned, along with several other homes, emblems of decades of disinvestment on Milwaukee's north side and a historic district on the verge of losing its character.

In a part of the city where residents are understandably more concerned about high-profile shooting deaths, prostitution and drug dealing than sagging porches and crumbling chimneys, the value of historic preservation as a tool for revitalization is being tested in an extreme way.

Gathered mostly along a couplet of curving streets — tucked into the wedge created by the intersection of W. Atkinson and N. Teutonia avenues — the neighborhood feels cohesive and unique, a place with a special story worth preserving.

"Somebody had a real vision here," said Yves LaPierre, a real estate analyst with the Department of City Development who supervises work done to historically significant homes owned by the city. "There was a great purpose to all of this being put here. To see it all fall apart is really sad."

Some residents, preservationists and community organizers believe the Garden Homes, an exemplar of affordable housing nearly a century ago, could become a model for much needed low-income housing again, in part because of its unique character and social history.

The hope is that preservation — often associated with saving individual landmarks — might help an entire neighborhood where the foreclosure crisis remains fresh and housing values continue to plummet.

While the neighborhood was placed on the National Register of Historic places more than a quarter of a century ago, it wasn't declared a historic district in Milwaukee until 2013, after homeowners banded together with the hopes of preventing homes from being demolished.

"It's a different world here," said Joe Bova, a longtime activist who has lived in the Garden Homes since 1970. "We have a gem, this jewel. This is something that is really important not just for us and our neighbors but, if you step back, this is one of the more important areas in Milwaukee."

A resilient core of homeowners and longtime residents in the Garden Homes actively supported the historic designation, despite the burdens that go with it, such as pricey renovations, which have to be done to historically accurate standards, said Carlen Hatala, of the city's Historic Preservation Commission.

"I will be here until the end," said Bernice Love, who has lived in the Garden Homes since 1969 and supported the designation. "This is a place that we love."

A forward-thinking project

Still applauded by architects and planners for its progressive design, the fan-shaped subdivision of small homes on small lots was an unprecedented experiment, the first municipally sponsored cooperative housing project in America.

Championed by Seidel and built under Milwaukee's more famous socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, the Garden Homes was inspired by the ideas of Ebenezer Howard and the Garden Cities movement in England.

"We do not expect to usher in the cooperative commonwealth in one or five years, but we do intend to do all our limited means permit to make Milwaukee a better place to live in," Seidel told the Milwaukee electorate, according to city documents.

When the neighborhood was built, tidy rows of cream-colored cottages, organized around a boulevard-like green park, lined streets with charming names like "Hampstead" and "Port Sunlight." The two-story Colonial Revival homes, which originally had red- or green-shingled roofs, are not remarkable unto themselves. Drop any one of these quaint cottages into another Milwaukee neighborhood, and historic preservation wouldn't be warranted.

Still, the Garden Homes represent an important piece of Milwaukee's history, one of national significance. The cooperative aspect of the project meant every resident owned shares in the neighborhood, built at cost because the socialist leaders behind it frowned on the profit motive.

As forward-thinking as the project may have been from a design perspective, there is also a grievous — if predictable for the era — side to the story. The now predominantly black enclave was for whites only, according to city documents.

"I have no qualms about that," said Love, who, like others is not jarred by that past. "I guess at one time you could say that about a lot of neighborhoods."

"Well, all history is not good history, right?" said Ashanti Hamilton, the alderman for the district, a proponent of the historic preservation efforts. "There is something about being able to acknowledge that reality and still be able to recognize the other historical significance as well."

Optimistic, but skeptical

A historic designation can create opportunities for funding, like tax credits for getting costly work done. Still, the math can be challenging, which can keep developers and buyers at bay.

In the Garden Homes, cheerful signs proclaim "This could be your home" in front of several of the homes that sit empty.

They were placed there by Howard Snyder of the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation, which has been working on economic development efforts in Milwaukee for decades. He wants to redevelop a portion of the Garden Homes as a sort of professional swan song, before he retires.

"Now that I know Emil Seidel lived in one of those houses, I have to honor that," said Snyder, whose nonprofit is working with PNC Bank and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority. They've placed several of the homes owned by the city on hold with the hope of restoring and selling them.

"This whole thing with these houses does scare me," said Snyder, suggesting that the financing is very tricky. "It's a neighborhood that's important. It's a neighborhood that's been overlooked. It's a neighborhood that's been invaded a million times, and I'm just the latest."

Snyder hopes to build what's called a "community microgrid" in the Garden Homes, an efficient and independent power source for the neighborhood that might use renewable sources of energy, such as solar power. It's the kind of high-tech twist that, along with tax credits related to preservation and low-income housing, might attract excitement and extra funding, including grants, he said.

Bova said he's willing to work with Snyder, but he's skeptical. He's seen too many well-intentioned efforts fail over the years. Meanwhile, the assessed value of his own home, in significantly better shape than most, has dropped from $66,500 to $47,800 in the last nine years alone.

With home values sliding, Bova believes the Garden Homes Neighborhood Association should simply raise funds to buy one house at a time and get them fixed up.

"We've got things in the works, we really do," said Love, also a longtime member of the neighborhood association.

Many of these efforts feel like a Hail Mary.

"The Garden Homes are about as difficult as it gets," said Matthew Jarosz, director of the Historic Preservation Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "People who stay and stick it out...their struggle is of the highest order. We can't lose these people, we have to, as a city, find a way to step it up."

Owners just walk away

Today, the City of Milwaukee is gaining a footprint in the Garden Homes because of tax-related foreclosures.

The disinvestment in the neighborhood is not new. It began with the loss of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s and '80s, followed by the toll of the foreclosure crisis and culminating in more recent years with waves of foreclosures resulting from tax delinquencies.

The city now owns eight homes, and others are "marching toward foreclosure" because of unpaid taxes, including Seidel's former home, at 4431 N. 25th St., which remains structurally sound, LaPierre said.

The Journal Sentinel was unable to reach Patricia Nelson, the current owner of Seidel's home, whose last known address is in Denver, according to city records. LaPierre has been unable to reach her as well.

That's not uncommon. Some owners just walk away from their homes. Among the 93 structures, some of which are duplexes, the city counts the number of abandoned homes at 14. Bova puts it closer to 23.

Many of the homes are visibly crumbling and the historic feel of the area is endangered. Most of the porches, probably the most distinctive characteristic of the homes, have been altered or sit slumped and weather beaten. Artificial siding has long since replaced the original stucco on most of the homes, and roofs are failing.

Inside, things are often worse.

"After a while, these houses all look alike," said LaPierre, walking through one of the city-owned homes, where a giant hole had been cut in the floor, walls had been torn up and piles of mail and clothes blanketed the floor — evidence of a sudden departure due to eviction, he presumed. "By the time we get them, when people have walked away, this is how it is."

The city's increasing ownership in the area means it can have a greater role in what happens next. Several homes could be sold and restored at once, presumably adding to the overall property values and providing a shift in perception, too.

The city, using a special fund created in 2010 to stabilize historic properties, invested in the exterior restoration of two homes in an effort to demonstrate what's possible.

LaPierre estimates about $80,000 was spent on one, including the restoration of the stucco, a pricey item. The home, which remains significantly damaged inside, was listed for a fraction of that cost and has remained unsold for a couple of years, he said.

A division of the Department of City Development called the Neighborhood Improvement Development Corporation restored another Garden Home inside and out, utilizing some federal stimulus funds. The cost approached six figures, LaPierre estimated. The house was sold for $31,500.

"I fell in love with this house," said Mia Price, 41, who bought it in 2013 with an inheritance she received after her mother died. "I absolutely love the people in the community."

More recently, the city has resorted to "mothballing" the homes it owns, which means doing minimal work to stabilize the structures so they don't deteriorate further, LaPierre said. Seidel's home, should it fall into city hands, will be mothballed, too.

"How do you save this neighborhood — I don't know," said LaPierre.

"Just because it is historic, just because it has this great history to it, doesn't make it immune to what is happening across the city. Somebody has got to figure out how to put it all back together...the last chapter has not been written."

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. Follow her on Facebook (www.facebook.com/artcity), Twitter (@artcity) and Instagram (marylouises). Email her at mschumacher@journalsentinel.com.