A new wading pool, shown above, was built in 1931 to replace Blackridge, the old swimming hole in Wauwatosa. – Milwaukee Journal photo
The above photo is of a new wading pool at Hoyt Park that replaced Blackridge, the swimming hole where Buddy and his friends used to go. It was published in the Milwaukee Journal on July 24, 1931.
The caption under the photo read: “The new Emerson D. Hoyt park wading pool for Wauwatosa children is shown above. The picture was taken early this week on the first day that the pool was put into use. Several hundred Wauwatosa children were splashing around even before the Wauwatosa fire department pumper had finished filling the pool with water. The pool, constructed at a cost of $1,500, has been dug out of an old bed of the Menomonee River about a block west of Ludington Ave. A drain pipe has been installed under the diving board do that the pool can be continually filled and drained, thereby always being filled with fresh water. The pool was laid out under the direction of M.L. Torkelson, Wauwatosa city engineer.”
Below are photos of the new pool at Hoyt Park and the area where the old swimming hole and this wading pool were.
In the early 1920s, the banks of the Menomonee River west of the Wauwatosa Village were covered with veritable jungles called “yunkles” by the locals. It was within these areas that homeless men, known as hobos or tramps, set up shelters like the one pictured.
This area on the Menomonee River in Hoyt Park used to be flooded by the Wauwatosa Fire Department in the 1920s and 1930s and used as a swimming hole. It was called Blackridge and was the place Buddy Schumacher was headed when he disappeared on Friday, July 24, 1925.
A view of Blackridge, the old swimming hole, from the ridge immediately to the west. The railroad tracks pass close by the swimming hole.
A movement to build a public swimming pool swelled after Buddy Schumacher’s death. Twelve years after Buddy died, a pool was OKd for land near Blackridge. The pool that stands there today, Tosa Pool at Hoyt Park, was built on the same site as that original pool.
Blackridge, the old swimming hole in Wauwatosa, before the construction of Hoyt Park pool nearby.
Paul J. Hoffman 