On a Friday in Lent, the line of cars stretches down West Oklahoma Avenue, idling past a low brick hall on the South Side while the smell of frying cod drifts through cracked windows. Inside, servers move trays of golden fish, Serbian potato salad slick with oil and garlic, and rye bread to tables packed shoulder to shoulder. A few blocks away, the green copper domes and gold crosses of a Byzantine cathedral catch the late afternoon light. This is Serbian Milwaukee, where an Orthodox congregation founded by foundry hands in 1912 grew into one of the most enduring ethnic institutions in the city, and where the most famous fish fry in America turns Catholic Lenten habit into a Serbian Orthodox livelihood.
The Serbs in Milwaukee built more than a parish. They built a hall that drew nine presidents, a cathedral whose mosaics took three and a half decades to finish, and a Bay View restaurant that won a James Beard award for cooking the food of the old country exactly the way grandmothers did.
Milwaukee’s South Side: The Place
Milwaukee’s South Side spreads below the Menomonee Valley, a flatland of brick bungalows, corner taverns, and church steeples that rises from the industrial lakefront toward the suburbs of West Allis and Cudahy. The Serbian story runs along a single corridor: from Walker’s Point near Third Street and National Avenue, where the immigrants first gathered, out to West Oklahoma Avenue and 51st Street, where the cathedral and Serb Hall sit side by side. Bay View, the old lakeshore mill district just southeast, holds the family restaurant. The whole geography is walkable, working-class, and within a short drive of the tanneries and packing plants that drew the first arrivals.
How the South Side Became Serbian Milwaukee
Before the Serbs
The South Side was German and Polish before it was anything else. The Menomonee Valley below it filled with foundries, rolling mills, tanneries, and meatpacking houses through the late nineteenth century, and the neighborhoods above it filled with the laborers who fed those industries. Walker’s Point, settled by George Walker in the 1830s, had become a dense immigrant quarter by the time the first Serbs stepped off the trains. They arrived into a city already organized around the parish, the saloon, and the ten-hour shift.
The Serbs Arrive
Serbs began reaching Milwaukee in the late nineteenth century, part of a larger movement of Balkan peoples to the industrial cities along Lake Michigan, from Racine and Kenosha up through Milwaukee to Chicago. They came overwhelmingly from the Austro-Hungarian borderlands rather than the kingdom of Serbia itself: from Lika, Slavonia, Vojvodina, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, regions where Serbs lived under Habsburg rule and felt the pressure of poverty and conscription. In Milwaukee they took the hardest jobs, in the tanneries and packing plants strung along the south side lakefront, at the bottom rungs of the city’s industrial ladder.
Chain migration did the rest. A man from a village in Lika would send word and steamship money home, and a brother or cousin would follow into the same boarding house and the same shift. By 1906 the community had organized a fraternal lodge in West Allis. On February 8, 1912, a group met at the shop of a man named Rade Ostojic and founded a Serbian Orthodox congregation, naming it for Saint Sava, the medieval prince and monk who is the patron of the Serbian church. They bought a house at 724 South Third Street for $3,500 and served their first Divine Liturgy on Christmas Day, January 7, 1913. By that year the Serbian population of Milwaukee had grown to roughly 3,000.
Serbian Milwaukee at Its Peak
Immigration slowed to a trickle after the restrictive federal quotas of the 1920s, then surged again after the Second World War. Religious and political refugees from Communist Yugoslavia, many of them royalists who had backed the exiled king, gained admission under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. They arrived educated, embittered by the war, and fiercely attached to the church, and they pushed the parish to think bigger.
The result was a building boom on Oklahoma Avenue. Serb Hall opened in 1950, the cathedral was consecrated in 1958, and a Serbian cultural center followed in 1973. By the early 1990s, informal estimates put the Serbian-American population of metropolitan Milwaukee around 15,000, swelled again by people fleeing the wars that tore apart Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995. The South Side parish became the gravitational center of Serbian life in Wisconsin, and Serb Hall became its public face.
The Change
What changed was geography and generation. The grandchildren of the foundry workers moved to Greenfield, Franklin, and the suburbs ringing the county, and the tight Walker’s Point and South Side blocks thinned out. The 2000 census counted roughly 5,500 people of Serbian ancestry in Milwaukee, a smaller and more dispersed figure than the community’s own estimates. The church and the hall stayed put on Oklahoma Avenue, anchors for a population that now drove in from farther away. Then the pandemic of 2020 and 2021 emptied the banquet calendar and put the most famous Serbian institution in the city up for sale.
The Landmarks of Serbian Milwaukee
St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, 3201 South 51st Street. The congregation outgrew its Walker’s Point house by the 1950s and bought fourteen acres at 51st Street and West Oklahoma Avenue. Ground was broken on August 26, 1956, the building was finished on February 4, 1958, and it was consecrated that August during the Serbian Days festival. Designed by the firm Camburas and Theodore in the Serbo-Byzantine style, with green domes and a limestone face, it was elevated to cathedral status in 1963.
The mosaics of St. Sava. What makes the cathedral extraordinary is its interior. Under a contract signed in 1969, the Italian artist Sirio Tonelli began covering the walls with mosaics in the Byzantine iconographic tradition, depicting saints, prophets, and scenes from scripture in glittering glass. The project cost more than three million dollars and took roughly thirty-five years to complete, producing some of the most extensive church mosaics in the United States. In 2022 the parish announced it had paid off the last of the loans tied to its buildings.
American Serb Hall, 5101 West Oklahoma Avenue. A fund for a community hall was first proposed in 1934, but it took until 1949 to buy the land and 1950 to open the doors. The hall was dedicated to the Serbian Orthodox young men who had served in the United States armed forces, fifteen of whom died, and a memorial to them stands in the lobby. It opened with twelve bowling lanes, two bars, and a hall that could seat hundreds, later expanded to hold two thousand.
The Serb Hall fish fry. In 1967 the hall started selling Friday fish, and the tradition became a Milwaukee institution and, by its own boast, the largest weekly fish fry in the world. At its height it moved a ton of fish in a single Friday, double that on Good Friday, with a drive-through window feeding the cars lined up on Oklahoma Avenue. That an Orthodox hall built its reputation on a Lenten ritual borrowed from Catholic Milwaukee is the perfect emblem of the city: fried cod and perch, Serbian-style potato salad dressed in oil, vinegar, garlic, and red pepper, and coleslaw, served to anyone who showed up hungry.
The political stage at Serb Hall. For half a century, no one ran for office in Wisconsin without stopping at Serb Hall. Vice President Richard Nixon campaigned there on October 1, 1956. On April 3, 1960, John and Jacqueline Kennedy drew a crowd of three thousand into the overheated hall days before the Wisconsin primary, a scene captured in the documentary Primary. Ronald Reagan came in 1980 and again as president in 1984, and that same April George H. W. Bush bowled on its lanes, slipped, and knocked down nine pins anyway. Bill Clinton rallied there in a steelworkers’ jacket in 1992.
Three Brothers Restaurant, 2414 South St. Clair Street, Bay View. In 1956 a Serbian immigrant named Milun Radicevic took over a former Schlitz brewery tavern in Bay View and opened a restaurant named for his three sons, who were still in the old country. Radicevic had survived the Balkan Wars, the First World War, capture by the Germans and escape from a camp in the Second, before a Lutheran family sponsored his passage to Milwaukee in 1949. The restaurant won a James Beard Foundation America’s Classic award in 2002 and has been a city landmark since 1976, still run by his descendants, still serving roast lamb and burek and goulash in the same dim, warm rooms.
Where the Milwaukee Serbs Came From
The first and largest wave came not from Serbia proper but from the Serb communities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: the Military Frontier districts of Lika and Slavonia in present-day Croatia, the plains of Vojvodina, and the mountain villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina. These were people for whom emigration to a Milwaukee tannery was an escape from rural poverty and Habsburg military service, and their village ties shaped which boarding houses and which lodges they joined.
The later arrivals came from a different history. The displaced persons of the late 1940s were refugees from Tito’s Yugoslavia, often royalist officers and their families who refused to live under Communism. The 1990s brought a third wave, Serbs uprooted by the wars in Bosnia and Croatia and by the economic collapse of Serbia itself, who chose Milwaukee precisely because a parish and a hall and a community were already waiting for them.
Serbian Milwaukee Today
The cathedral parish is still the center of gravity. St. Sava remains an active congregation, its mosaic-lined sanctuary one of the few places in the American Midwest to see Byzantine church art on that scale, and every August it hosts the Serbian Days festival with its barbecue lamb and pig, cevapi, sarma, burek, kolo dancing, and a sweet shop that empties by Sunday night. The faith and the food, more than any neighborhood, now hold the community together.
Serb Hall’s future is the open question. The cathedral, which owns the hall, listed it for sale in 2021 at around two million dollars after the pandemic gutted its banquet revenue. The fish fry, run through the worst of it from the drive-through window, returned to full dine-in service in February 2023 and keeps winning local polls for the city’s best, even as the building’s long-term ownership stays unsettled. What is confirmed is that the line of cars still forms on Fridays.
The Serbs who came for the tanneries are mostly gone from the South Side blocks now, scattered into the suburbs their grandchildren chose. But the cathedral’s crosses still rise over Oklahoma Avenue, the restaurant in Bay View still cooks the old recipes by hand, and on a Lenten Friday the whole city, Serbian or not, still lines up for the fish. An immigrant church that started in a converted house in 1912 turned its food and its faith into landmarks the rest of Milwaukee adopted as its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Serbs settle in Milwaukee?
Serbs came to Milwaukee beginning in the late nineteenth century for industrial work, taking jobs in the tanneries and meatpacking plants along the south side lakefront. Most came from the Austro-Hungarian Balkans, drawn by chain migration as relatives sent steamship money and helped newcomers into the same neighborhoods and shifts. The Serbs in Milwaukee clustered first in Walker’s Point before spreading across the South Side.
Is the South Side still Serbian today?
Less than it once was. The 2000 census counted roughly 5,500 people of Serbian ancestry in Milwaukee, and many families have moved to suburbs like Greenfield and Franklin. But St. Sava Cathedral and Serb Hall on West Oklahoma Avenue remain active anchors, and the community drives in for services, the fish fry, and the annual Serbian Days festival.
What are the most famous Serbian landmarks in Milwaukee?
The three best known are St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral on South 51st Street, with its Byzantine mosaics that took about thirty-five years to complete; American Serb Hall on West Oklahoma Avenue, famous for the largest weekly fish fry in Milwaukee and visits from nine presidents; and Three Brothers Restaurant in Bay View, a James Beard America’s Classic award winner serving Serbian food since 1956.
Where did the Milwaukee Serbs come from?
The earliest and largest group came from the Serb communities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Lika and Slavonia in today’s Croatia, Vojvodina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later waves arrived as displaced persons fleeing Communist Yugoslavia after 1948 and as refugees from the wars and economic collapse of the 1990s, with the established parish drawing them to the South Side.
When did Serbs first arrive in Milwaukee?
The first Serbs reached Milwaukee in the late nineteenth century for work in the city’s tanneries and packing houses. The community organized formally when it founded the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox congregation on February 8, 1912, and held its first liturgy on Christmas Day, January 7, 1913. By then the Serbs in Milwaukee numbered around 3,000.
If your family’s story passed through a South Side boarding house, a foundry shift, or a pew at St. Sava, the names and routes that carried them to Milwaukee are part of a larger map worth tracing. The same Balkan migrations shaped the Serbs of Chicago and the Croatians of Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, just as an earlier wave built German Milwaukee a generation before.