Gay bar on water street in milwaukee wisconsin oh yeah

In a building whose history goes back toit attracts a hybrid of gay and straight folks. The name itself alludes to the changes that have occurred in society and in the gay tavern business in recent years. Meanwhile, the target audience included a growing population in the Brady Street — East Side areas consisting of folks who perhaps did not care to travel a couple of miles for a congenial tavern.

Hybrid Lounge, City’s Newest Gay Bar

The nearest spot, the venerable This Is Itwas still a good hike downtown. It was located in an old building at the southeast corner of E. Brady and N. Van Buren streets at the foot of the Edward D. Holton Viaduct. That makes the nearly six year old Hybrid — the newest gay bar in the city — the oldest bar on the block.

Hybrid occupies two buildings as its cocktail campus. The older and larger of the two is the two-story corner structure at E. Brady St. It was constructed in as a store at what had then been Van Buren St. At that time, Brady and Van Buren was just another intersection on the lower east side. That was soon to change a couple of years later when the first Holton Viaduct spanned the Milwaukee River from its launching pad just to the north.

A June, Milwaukee Journal article looked forward to the opening of the new bridge, the completion of which was delayed by some months. In the store was run by a fellow named Chas. Arnapalokyor maybe Arnapolsky, or who knows what? Arnol and his wife, Annaran the place and lived upstairs, as was customary with such mom-and-pop mercantile operations of the era.

The automobile age was soon to displace the horse-and-buggy era here, although thousands of horses were still stabled within the city limits, sometimes rather noxiously close to houses and grocery stores. Meanwhile, the store on the corner kept butchering and producing. Apparently this grocery store was at least in part a legitimate enterprise during Prohibition, even though the neighborhood was active in the production of wine, mostly originating in the basements of the numerous Sicilians who had moved there from their homeland, after a stint in the Third Ward.

Within a block were such families as the Balistrieristhe Aliotosthe Librizzisand others, living next to each other on Brady Street. All had connections to the liquor business from the pre-Prohibition era. Photo by Michael Horne. BradleySkinnerWatsonMartin and Fitzgerald joined the North Shore diaspora as Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants flooded the old neighborhood with their soft drinks and foreign tongues.

Trains ran east-west on Brady Street, and north-south across the current Holton Viaduct, constructed in The Transfer Inn would be a perfectly convenient spot to drink a beer and to sit and wait for the next street car, or the one after. Or the one after that.