Downtown Green Bay
Packers Heritage Trail
The Packers were founded in downtown Green Bay in 1919 and have had a presence here ever since.
In 1921, their inaugural season in what is now the NFL, they held their first practice at the Old Courthouse Grounds at the southwest corner of Cherry and Jefferson Streets. Later that year, before the first-ever Packer-Bears game, the Lumberjack Band gathered at DeLair's Cafe on Washington Street and paraded in hunting caps, mackinaws, corduroy pants and high boots en route to catching a midnight train to Chicago.
Curly Lambeau worked as a salesman at Stiefel's, a men's clothing store on Washington, for most of the 1920's when he was both coaching and playing for the Packers.
Downtown was where players continued to live, eat, party and mingle with fans into the Glory Years of the 1960s and even beyond. It was the heart of "Titletown," the nickname Green Bay adopted during the Lombardi Dynasty.
That was a special time and the national media flocked to Green Bay to laud those great Packers teams and their larger-than-life coach. In turn, many of them romanticized about downtown's most popular haunts, the rapturous mood of the people on its streets and how a cherished football team had turned this small, sometimes bitterly cold Midwestern city into a paradise.
Sponsored by:
Ron and Colleen Weyers Family
Marker can be reached from North Washington Street south of Mains Street (U.S. 141), on the right when traveling south.
Courtesy hmdb.org
