Once upon a time at Marquette,

Makeshift bars in the dorms were sanctioned.

Students drank freely from kegs on the campus lawn.

And about a dozen bars populated Marquette’s land and the surrounding area within a square mile any given year between 1935 and 1984.

In about forty years, Marquette underwent a paradigm shift from a beertopia to a semi-dry campus, spurred primarily by university property acquisition under a multi-million dollar neighborhood improvement plan by Campus Circle, a nonprofit group formed by the university.

Marquette and several business partners – Catholic Knights Insurance, Wisconsin Bell and Wisconsin Energy Corp. (among others) – helmed Campus Circle and created the revitalization program under the direction of University President the Rev. Albert DiUlio and Patrick LeSage, director of Campus Circle, in 1991.

Since then, the number of bars decreased from a robust assortment of establishments – many decades-old with rich histories – to a meager selection of 2 pubs: Caffrey’s and Murphy’s. Marquette bought out the majority of these properties, including long-standing campus legends like The Avalanche Super Bar – now Campus Town East – and O’Donoghue’s Pub – now the Evan Scholars’ House.

The impetus for this tavern genocide and community face-lift was catalyzed by a string of six well-publicized Marquette student murders within seven years from 1984 to 1991 (according to documents by the 1995 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence selection committee, which considered Campus Circle for its award). Negative media attention resulting from the too-close-for-comfort Jeffrey Dahmer serial slayings and the thousands of gore gawkers flocking to his former residence at 924 N. 25 St. punctuated the dire situation for Marquette as enrollment began to sharply decline.

Applications from students living within the circulation of Milwaukee newspapers covering the campus crime dropped by half or more, while applicants from other areas held steady. DiUlio reported in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that entering freshmen declined from a high of 2,113 in 1988 to 1,600 in 1991.

Rather than uproot Marquette’s campus or erect a wall around the premises, DiUlio enlisted a former classmate, LeSage, to help him with his vision to rejuvenate the area by creating Campus Circle in 1991. To curb the decline in applications as quickly as possible, “A ‘quick and dirty’ assessment was made of all properties in terms of value, rehabilitation costs and potential,” the Bruner Award document stated.

In the winter of 1992, Campus Circle began acquiring properties in a “decaying” 90 square-block area contiguous to the university to develop student housing, commercial property and low-cost housing for local residents.

As of 1995, Campus Circle had already purchased over 150 properties, owned $50 million in real estate value, built or renovated 153 units of new student housing and acquired 88,000 square-feet of commercial space.

Many of these bought-out properties included campus bars, which were perceived as neighborhood blights that attracted the wrong crowd and took up space better used for commercial properties: “Once-thriving commercial streets have become dotted with empty lots, with taverns and liquor stores replacing other kinds of retail functions,” the document said.

But the university held their ground—this wasn’t about making Marquette a dry campus: “We don’t want to reduce the number of bars in the area. If we did, the kids would just go somewhere else to drink,” LeSage said to the Milwaukee Journal.

And yet, the bars began to disappear. Steve Lechter, co-owner of The Avalanche, said he was optimistic that Campus Town would not force out his bar. “I think (Marquette officials) understand the depth of nostalgia and tradition for the Avalanche,” Lechter said in a Milwaukee Sentinel article from May of 1992.

Later that year, Marquette paid $1.1 million to The Avalanche, which leased the operation of the bar out for another five years. The university then shut it down to expand Campus Town.

LeSage also said in that same article that the building that housed O’Donoghue’s would likely be preserved. But two months prior to that, Marquette paid owners Daniel and Helen O’Donoghue $5,000 for the option to eventually purchase the building for $600,000, according to an article from The Milwaukee Journal in March of 1993.

It was one of the most harrowing blows to the campus drinking culture. The university was serious about change—despite all opposition against it. The O’Donoghues said they never definitively agreed to sell their pub and that Marquette was “attempting to ‘steal’ it at an unfair price,” in that same article. But the court ruled in Marquette’s favor after the university sued the couple for refusing to honor the deal the two parties made a year prior.

Concerns didn’t just come from malcontent students and bar owners facing the eradication of their hangouts. Some critics indicted Campus Circle as a university-led gentrification of the area. In a section of the Bruner Award document titled, “Issues That Could Affect Selection as a Winner,” the committee outlined criticisms of the Campus Circle project: “This is a top-down program based on the enlightened self-interest of Marquette University. While it has been done with real concern for neighborhood issues and needs, and attempts at local input, it is clear that Marquette owns and manages this project. Some in local community groups feel that resident participation in planning has been minimal.”

But crime did decrease following the implementation of the Campus Circle revamp. Marquette’s Avenues West neighborhood saw serious reported crimes decrease by 53.3 percent since 1990 in
according to Milwaukee Police Department statistics. The removal of local drug and prostitution houses certainly helped this turnaround, but some alumni are dubious about the project’s reduction of campus bars, along with Marquette’s stricter alcohol consumption rules.

Elizabeth Edwards, an alumnus from the class of ’05, said she felt Marquette has always discouraged its students from social drinking instead of accepting it as a cultural norm.

“Their solution is to take away a lot of the local bars and be stricter on drinking in the dorms…” Edwards said. “I think one easy solution in their mind is ‘out of sight, out of mind…’ and get rid of the bars.”

Another Marquette graduate, Joan Grant from the class of ’82, said she agreed with the school’s decision to clean up the area’s eyesore buildings, but thinks part of the university’s intent in buying out the campus bars is burying Marquette’s rowdy past.

“I think changing its reputation is part of what they’re trying to do,” Joan Grant said. “It used to be considered one of the biggest party schools in the country – it was like a competition between the University of Wisconsin (–Madison) and Marquette. I think that’s the image Marquette is trying to squash, and unfortunately, some of the positive things that got caught in the way were its campus bars.”

Her favorite hangout was the Gym Bar, because “it was always packed and had a good crowd,” she said. “I was in the Gym Bar when Marquette won the national championship game in 1977, and literally people were hanging from the rafters cheering.”

That wasn’t the only memory that got swept under the rug. She said she remembers students hauling kegs up to floor parties in McCormick Hall and enjoying the university-sponsored mixers, which provided barrels of beer, on the campus mall (although Wisconsin’s drinking age was not raised to age 21 until 1986).

“As an alumnus, I enjoyed coming back for reunions and events and revisiting those bars,” Grant said. “That’s part of the enjoyment – I think it’s a universal thing to go back to campus to these nostalgic places, and when you eliminate them, it makes you feel like this isn’t where you belong.”

More recently, Marquette moved again to alter the drinking culture on campus when it updated its alcoholic beverages policy this year to crack down on its abuse and underage usage. Marquette’s Policies and Procedures now includes a new scale that alphabetically categorizes violations from least severe, A, to most severe, D, with fines ranging from $50 to $750 that inflate with the severity of the infraction. These penalties may also include warning, probation or suspension.

“Marquette is definitely stricter on the dorm drinking,” Edwards said. “We used to have RAs who would understand it is better to have them safe in the dorm and drink than out with fake IDs, or roaming for a good house party.”

Marquette also added a complicity policy to the student code of conduct, which indicts students that condone or encourage another person’s behavior that violates any standard of conduct. But the most controversial addition to the new policy involves the university’s condemnation of drinking while on campus, regardless of legal drinking age, according to Marquette’s Policies and Procedures.

Dr. Joyce Wolburg, Associate Dean of the College of Communication who conducted and published studies on the drinking culture at Marquette, said a lot of students already feel the current legal drinking age is unreasonable, so asking them not to drink at all is probably unrealistic.

But as drinking rules change, so do drinking rituals and customs, according to Wolburg. Her current interview-based research is investigating a new practical and incidentally responsible trend among Marquette students, particularly underage drinkers.

“A lot of students told me – contrary to what a lot of outsiders might think – you don’t want to be the person in a group that drinks the most,” Wolburg said. “That person is a liability if (he or she) drinks too much and other people have to cut their night short to take (him or her) home. They don’t want to get a friend in trouble by reporting them, and if someone is trying to be the responsible one, it puts them in a heck of a position to monitor their safety.”

Wolburg also noted that not every student on campus drinks, but those who do look for – and tend to find – a way to make it happen.

“If there aren’t many bars on campus, they’ll go to bars farther away from campus,” she said.

And for many students, including Stephanie Grant, daughter of Joan Grant and a senior in the College of Education, Wolburg is right. “I feel like Murphy’s and Caffrey’s have very similar atmospheres. I’d like a little more variety.”

Once a campus with enough rituals to keep a student satisfied, there seems to be little to keep the campus legacy alive. And so as the bars dwindle to the overcrowding and repetitiveness of Caffrey’s and Murphy’s, Marquette students do go elsewhere to drink, spending their weekends on Water Street and North Avenue.

As students scatter to the many bars all across Milwaukee to make their memories, what happens to those which were once so close to home?