It seems that these early night spots were reserved for men only. Robert Wells, in This Is Milwaukee, cites the Third Ward’s Milwaukee House, which featured a bar and a two-piece band, as “the center of Milwaukee’s swinging night life.” Some of the best-known of these early places were the Shanty Inn, along the west bank of the Milwaukee River, and the Triangle Inn, located at Water and Huron (now Clybourn) streets, which is believed to have been the area’s first tavern. Most of these places catered to traveling laborers and offered overnight lodgings. However, there have also been examples of deviation from these norms in Milwaukee’s nightlife, places where the races mingled, where women drank in the company of men, and where homosexual men and women could meet-all before these ideas were widely accepted socially.Īfter-dark entertainment in early Milwaukee consisted primarily of downing whiskey-and beer when it first arrived in the village sometime after 1839 -at any number of small “rum holes” located along the Milwaukee River. Historically, Milwaukee’s nightlife exhibited the kinds of racial and class restrictions that appeared in the city’s social order as a whole. Nightlife-the after-dark pursuit of entertainment, liquor, social mixing, romance, and sex-is an essential aspect of the city’s cultural fabric. Beginning in rustic boardinghouse barrooms serving straight whiskey and lively conversation and evolving into multi-million dollar night clubs with state-of-the-art sound systems entertaining finely-attired patrons, nightlife in Milwaukee has changed considerably as the city has grown and its population has diversified.