Friday, November 25, 2022

Going to Milwaukee

When I was in Milwaukee in June, I took exactly one photograph: this.

     I'm driving up to Milwaukee this afternoon to take in a Bucks game. Not a typical outing for me, but my brother-in-law is in town from California for Thanksgiving. He's a basketball fan and suggested going to the game, and I couldn't very well say no. It's been years since I've been to a basketball game; heck, with COVID, it sometimes feels like it's been years since I've been anywhere. They're playing the Cavaliers. Who knows? Maybe it'll be fun.
     Plus Milwaukee's only an hour away. Seventy miles due north. Thinking about the trip, I started assembling what I knew of the place. Milwaukee is the four-faced Allen-Bradley clock tower that announces you've arrived — usually, in my case, while passing through to some destination further north in Wisconsin, a state whose cheddar cheese friendliness has become curdled in recent years by all their red state nuttery. They don't fly flags declaring, "We've gone insane!" But the effect is the same.
     Not that I never stop in Milwaukee. 
I visited there for lunch in June, driving that new Porsche Taycan on a mad tour of charging stations. The Milwaukee Art Museum has this intricate, white, wing-like architecture that opens to greet the dawn, and 11 Georgia O'Keeffe's. My wife organized a visit there, as a sort of family field trip, maybe a decade ago. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember their display had an unmistakable Badger State slant, presenting O'Keeffe as a Wisconsin artist who grew up on a farm in Sun Prairie and, later, also did some work in the Southwest. It's as if the Art Institute of Chicago colored her as a Chicago artist because she went to school here for a year.
     Otherwise, we did once drive up to tour Marquette for our younger boy, which I think was some kind of homage on his part to Bulls star Jimmy Butler, who went there. I have the vaguest memory of red brick buildings, an urban school, and an immediate sense that this wasn't the place for him. Sports fandom must skip generations.
     And at some point — I think it was for the pranks book, which would make it the early 1990s, I drove up to use the library, and remember parking downtown on the strangely unpopulated main drag thinking, "It's so easy," and later meeting a former colleague from the Green Bay Press Gazette, where I interned during college, at some vast, empty German restaurant.     
    That's about it.
     The odd thing about Milwaukee is, despite having lived, if not quite in its shadow, then in close proximity, for the past 45 years, is how neutral I feel toward the place. I don't mind going, but also wouldn't feel bereft if I never went back. There's no sense of competition — Milwaukee has a quarter the population of Chicago — but also none of that automatic desire to tease a rustic hamlet. I don't have a lot of associations with Milwaukee — big for beer in the 19th century and, I suppose, still, and while I am a particular fan of Pabst NA in those blue cans — it tastes just as bad as regular Pabst — it isn't like I want to tour the plant and see them make the stuff.
     This has to reflect lack of initiative on my part. Maybe next year it would be worthwhile trying to get to know Milwaukee better, establish a sort of virtual Sun-Times Milwaukee Bureau and cable back some reports next summer. Who knows? There must be more to the place that I'm missing.

      

      


20 comments:

  1. Well, for retirement, it's an affordable and manageable sized-city option compared to Chicago and a short drive back to visit!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I lived and worked in Milwaukee from 1968 until 1972 (WTMJ) and married a woman from there in 2000. Really enjoyed the area and the people. Been back countess times since then. lotsa family and friends there.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I lived in Milwaukee for a little less than a year in the 70s and my strongest impression of the City is that the streets are -- I'm assuming deliberately -- askew. It has pretty much the same street names as Chicago, but State Street and other streets that run North-South here are East-West in Milwaukee. When I went back a few years later -- my daughter had some interest in Marquette (she ended up at Northwestern for 6 years with scads of friends she still sees), I didn't recognize anything. And I took a good long walk around what had been my (kind of slummy) neighborhood and it was still slummy, but with a different racial mix. However, the smell of boiling barley from the Miller brewery that reminded me of the smell of Gerber Foods in Niagara Falls, Canada, persisted

    john

    ReplyDelete
  4. Check out the Public Market for some good food and drinks. And maybe take a ride on the trolley.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Consider checking out the Milwaukee Art Museum. It's right on the lakefront and the building is stunning with light pouring in from everywhere.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I encourage readers to actually read the post before they comment.

      Delete
    2. My wife grew up in Chicago, I grew up in the suburbs. We currently live in Lake Geneva. We have lived here nine years. Milwaukee is a convience for us. We go there for sporting events, Fiserv Forum is very nice. We attend Brewer, Bucks, Admirals games, go to concerts on the Summerfest grounds and state fairgrounds, attend the state fair. We also have been to various cultural centers when going with school field trips. All our family is back in Chicagoland, but Milwaukee is easy to get in and out of, traffic is nothing compared to Chicago.We still go to sporting events and concerts in Chicago, but Milwaukee is much easier. Enjoy the game Neil.

      Delete
    3. Ha, have to agree with Neil here - strongly recommend

      Delete
    4. My bad completely. I will self banish for the prescribed period.

      Delete
  6. This post really resonates with me. Though it seems I've had somewhat more experience with Milwaukee than you have, "how neutral I feel toward the place" kinda surprises me, too. I've always enjoyed going there, but somehow, occasionally thinking "Hey, Milwaukee's only 90 miles away, why don't we head up there for the hell of it" doesn't seem to result in our doing it.

    In my younger days, I *did* "want to tour the plant and see them make the stuff" and did so at both the Pabst and Miller breweries back when they were much closer to their glory days. Plus, we've been to Brewers baseball games and the Pabst Mansion, to round out the beer references...

    Alas, I'm mostly a craft beer drinker now, though I've been sampling N/A beers too. New ones are being created all the time, as it's a growing market segment. I've never tried Pabst NA. I'm surprised to see you say that you're "a particular fan," since you always seem to disparage it when you mention it, which has kinda steered me away from it. Have you tried Athletic Upside Dawn, NS? Unfortunately, it's priced like a craft beer, but it's way better than the mainstream stuff, even the German versions, as far as I'm concerned.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It depends what you're looking for. If you want something that tastes good, drink Clausthaler. Which I do. But Pabst is cheap — half the price — in cans, and tastes exactly like the swill I drank in high school. It's a nostalgia trip. I think the point of confusion is my ability to acknowledge that liking something and it being any good are two different things. I also like circus peanuts, but I'd never argue they're good. Plus, with Pabst, when I go up to Ontonagon, it blends in with the cans of regular Pabst everyone else is drinking.

      Delete
    2. Nothing wrong with a nostalgia trip, or drinking cheap beer, for that matter. I did so for decades and still do on occasion, depending on the situation.

      Clausthaler is good; I agree. For a couple dollars more, if one is so inclined, Upside Dawn is better. IMHO.

      Circus peanuts, on the other hand, are an abomination! ; )

      Delete
  7. Had to laugh at Neil’s reply above. Only thing missing is a *slaps forehead*

    ReplyDelete
  8. I grew up in Chicago and lived there for 42 years as a kid and as an adult, but I hardly ever went to Milwaukee, even though I wasn't all that far away. Never made it to their great zoo, but I went to the Mitchell Domes (their botanic gardens) and to a few Brewer games, where I tailgated at old County Stadium. Saw Linda Ronstadt at Summerfest in '84 and wished that Chicago had a lakefront venue like that. Years later, a month before 9/11, I drank at a cool spy-themed bar, near downtown, called the Safe House, which is quite well-known. I hear Chicago also has one now.

    My first wife was a graphic artist and painter, and in the mid-Eighties she met a Milwaukee couple who also painted. We visited them, in what seemed like a rather sketchy part of town, that same winter. Could it have been near West Vliet Street? That rings a bell. My wife was blown away by their funky neighborhood and the art scene there, and she immediately believed we could move north and live there for a lot less than in Evanston. She could work less, and paint more. I didn't buy it at all, and it was much too far away from Wrigley's bleachers, so we didn't do it. We moved south instead...West Rogers Park, where she shared studio space over a sporting goods store on Western.

    Milwaukee has all the other big-city woes...poverty, drugs, crime, and slummy parts of town. One morning in the mid-Nineties, while visiting my sister, we were eating in a Minneapolis diner. Two shady characters tried to sell us a couple of hot watches. Turned out they were ex-Chicagoans, who'd had just moved to Minnesota from Milwaukee, mostly because Minnesota had better welfare benefits than Wisconsin.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, actually only 36 years...unless one considers six years in DeKalb County as living in Chicago. Which some now do...thanks to the tollway, population growth, westward urban spawl, and the expansion of what constitutes the Chicago metro area. Do folks still call it Chicagoland?

      Delete
    2. Did folks ever call it Chicagoland, outside of radio and TV?

      Delete
    3. "Chicagoland " is an ersatz term cooked up by Tribune real estate section in the 1920s. I've never heard it used outside car dealer ads. I think it's non-commercial use is a sign of cluelessness.

      Delete
    4. Bingo. I've never heard anyone ask a stranger on a train (or on a plane) "So...what part of Chicagoland are you from?" It's mostly used by shills on radio or TV spots--"Best deals in the Chicagoland area!"

      And when my partner was trying to get me to relocate to Milwaukee in the mid-Eighties, I told her that the first thing I would need to do would be to buy the tallest roof antenna available, in order to still be able to hear classical music on WFMT and jazz on WBEZ. That's how Chicago-centric I was, back in the day, when the internet was still years away.

      Delete
  9. The thing about living in Chicago is... and I'm just going to say this flat-out, without trying to sound either hoity-toity or falsely modest, but... when you're used to living in Chicago, then practically everything else seems smaller. Practically everything else IS smaller, unless you're traveling as far as New York or London.

    I've been to Milwaukee many times over the years, and always had Chicago fish-out-of-water experiences, mostly enjoyable. I've driven the 894 bypass during the rush hour and thought, "THIS is the rush hour?" I've visited General Mitchell International Airport several times, and left there convinced that I could have simply parked out front with the blinkers on, and found my car still there when returning days later.

    I don't doubt that their cultural places are just fine. We've done the Zoo up there; very nice. I first visited The Safe House back in the mid-1980s, and carried my Secret Access Card in my wallet until all the printing wore off. Neil, might that "vast, empty German restaurant" have been Mader's? I was last there many years ago, when it was definitely not empty, and was relieved to learn via Google that they're still there. I need to go again.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, not Mader's — I was there last night. It's subdivided into small rooms. In my memory, this was some huge, dim, barnlike place. Over 30 years ago, so that's the best I can do.

      Delete

Comments are moderated, and posted at the discretion of the proprietor.