Fox Music

Fox Music is located at 100 E Main St, Watertown, Wisconsin. This is a store I spent significant time in as a kid, although it was in a different location then. In addition to being an interesting place to shop for old records and antiques, the current location is an excellent example of cream brick architecture from the turn of the century.



According to the Watertown Historic Society, it was originally two buildings built in 1890 and later joined. The original buildings were the Clara Weiss Millinery Store and the Merchants National Bank. Clara Weiss produced women's hats until the 1920s and was well know in the city for her lavish parties to celebrate the anniversary of her divorce. Any German speakers know what that word means?

Fox Music is a sprawling store that takes up two floors of the entire building. You can wander around anywhere in the building, and it showcases cream brick on all of its exterior and interior walls. The interior walls have beautiful brick archways over the doors. The brick is a very clean, white color, much whiter than most cream city brick. It is also  rare to find cream brick this clean since it gets discolored very easily due to its porosity.



This is the whitest cream city brick I have seen.

According to the Watertown Historic Society, the entire building was covered in an incredibly ugly metal and concrete facade. Apparently the brick was in good shape underneath the facade, and in 2003 the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, along with many other buildings on Main St. Watertown was a large producer of cream bricks, with two brick factories. Many cream brick houses can be found in Watertown, as well as old factories and almost the entire main street. This building is the perfect example of beautiful historic architecture that exists all over southern-eastern Wisconsin that has been covered up, painted, or generally forgot about. It's great to see a renewed interest in this part of our history, and I'm happy that a store I was so connected to as a teenager is taking good care of the building.