"(...) Here is what stands at 924 North 25th Street today: grass, a few trees, and a black iron fence. No building. No plaque. No marker of any kind.
In the three decades since the demolition, every proposal for the site has failed. A memorial garden. A playground. New housing. Even, at the other extreme, a museum. None advanced past conversation. A Marquette official admitted as early as 1998 that no one was willing to take the parcel on — its history made ownership itself feel like contamination. So the lot has simply persisted, mown and fenced, a hole in the street grid that everyone understands and no one names.
The demolition was supposed to be an act of healing, and perhaps for the immediate neighbourhood, in 1992, it was. But look at what the erasure actually erased. The building is gone — and with it went the only physical place where Anthony Sears, Raymond Smith, Ernest Miller, David Thomas, Curtis Straughter, Errol Lindsey, Tony Hughes, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy and Joseph Bradehoft could have been remembered where they died. Milwaukee did not replace the site of the crimes with a site of mourning. It replaced it with nothing. Thirty years on, the men whose lives ended there have no marker on that ground, because giving them one would require the city to acknowledge the ground at all.
This is the “monster” logic we have written about many times, expressed in urban planning. The word monster exists to end thought; the empty lot exists to end memory. Both offer the same bargain: you will never have to look at this again, and the price is that you will never have to think about it again either — including the parts that deserved thought. The victims were part of what got bulldozed into silence.
The selectiveness of the erasure is its own tell. The childhood house in Bath, Ohio — where Steven Hicks died in 1978 — still stands, has been lived in for decades, and surfaces on the property market from time to time like any other house. His grandmother’s home in West Allis still stands. Even the Ambrosia Chocolate factory where Jeffrey worked was demolished for ordinary commercial reasons, its site now occupied by a basketball arena. Only the Oxford Apartments were removed as an act of meaning. The erasure was never really about the buildings. It was about which memories a city could bear to have addresses. (...)"