Whether I visit a new city, I always try to keep a neutral perspective beforehand, even if it’s a place where I’ve heard good things about (Toronto and Asheville, NC were two such cases.)

I admit I was secretly hoping Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city at roughly 570,000 residents, wouldn’t be a disappointment. Not that I want any city or town we visit to be disappointing that way, but Milwaukee would be the only major city of the three on this trip that we hadn’t visited before.

Suffice it to say, we weren’t disappointed. In fact, if you add in the baseball game (see Part 1 of this recent series), we ended up with thoughts that if we had one more big move in us, the city named after the Algonquin word for “Good Land” (there’s still a huge debate over that take, however) might land on our finals list.

(A Small Digression: while we have a general set of ideas for places we want to visit for any city, we’re willing to be flexible in terms of how we get from one place to another or change destinations. As a result, we end up driving through places previously unintended; over the years, I personally find it gives me a greater sense of that area as a whole.

As we found out from a GPS-directed reroute to avoid a huge backup on the main freeway (I-94), Milwaukee shares issues that are common to other large cities. The rough-edged North Division area of the city and surroundings are fairly well-hidden away from the pretty stuff in downtown and other areas we concentrated on during our days in what locals call “Cream City.”

Stuff like this is complex and happens over time, but the main catalysts are primarily things like segregation as well as the natural result of a capitalist (with a heavy tinge of racism/classism/nativism) system. In that way, Milwaukee is really no different from other big cities around this country.

However, seeing poverty and decay like this doesn’t rack me with paranoid-like fear like it used to, nor like many more shielded folks who rant about it on social media and the like (as if it was a mortal offense to their person) increasingly do. Rather, it reminds me that we could and should as a society be doing more to improve things for all. This hidden privilege to NOT see this stuff outside their doors is an underrated one – out of sight, out of mind is not an option for the residents of any hard-scrabble community. Plus, that collective mental ignorance from those merely glancing in doesn’t make these issues go away.

A sage observation that I’ve taken to heart is that things would be far better for pretty much everyone if pretty much everyone was happy with their security and circumstances. Likewise, to believe that society has spread those simple treasures around evenly to everyone is a delusional belief at best.

Yes, rags-to-riches is almost always a compelling storyline, though some undeserving of such praise have tried to co-opt it to their benefit (billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon comes to mind – let’s just say the number of people in the world who have parents able to toss $300K at their risk to your pie-in-the-sky book-selling idea is fairly minuscule.) Regardless of substance, a rags-to-riches story, especially from a hard-knock neighborhood, would ideally be a very rare occurrence due to the lack of necessity to do so, versus the difficulty of the process to do just that. And the fact that this country is an uber-competitive, cutthroat, and highly populated capitalist society, the reality is very few can and will finish the quest.)

Now…onward with the fun stuff

HIGHLIGHTS

Uncle Wolfie’s Breakfast Tavern – In a way, I’m not surprised that Ube, a purple yam used plentifully in Filipino cuisine, has been adopted by the larger culinary community in recent years. While anything like this can be argued as cultural appropriation, in the case of Ube, I think it’s more of a social media issue. Ube gives most everything an eye-catching purple tinge that gives it a visual appeal perfect for something like Instagram, even if the taste of the dish isn’t necessarily improved by the addition.

We didn’t exactly expect anything revelatory when we ordered Uncle Wolfie’s Ube Toast Crunch Oatmeal, but this might’ve been the best breakfast item we had the entire trip, and it was easily top three of all food dishes we had.

Opened in 2018 in the Brewers Hill neighborhood, this somewhat non-descript space on the outside brims with energy inside. Touches of current and former Columbus brunch places (Skillet, Geordie’s and Philco) can be found here, but with a Milwaukee vibe, where enjoying a beer and/or a Bloody Mary with your meal is standard procedure. FWIW, their Spamalette (SPAM, tamari soy, shiitake, Alpine cheese and more) is about as gourmet (and delicious) a take as you’ll ever get with SPAM.

Uncle Wolfie’s Breakfast Tavern| Address: 234 E Vine St, Milwaukee, WI 53212 | Website: http://www.unclewolfies.com/togo-brunch-menu | IG: unclewolfies

Milwaukee Art Museum – being baseball fans, we somewhat expected that American Family Field (where we caught the homestanding Brewers) would be a rather imposing presence; being on the outskirts of Milwaukee, it competes with the skyline of Downtown proper depending on the direction you’re viewing them from.

You could easily argue that the Milwaukee Art Museum, designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava (known for many elegant structures, including but not exclusive to The Turning Torso skyscraper in Sweden and the Museu do Amanhã in Rio de Janeiro) is equally as elegant and flowing along the shoreline of Lake Michigan as American Family Field is as stark and imposing a few miles inland.

You get the impression early that this museum is a half notch above many just from the car garage, which looks like it could be its own piece of artwork. A long, glass-laden passage with symmetrical arches provides a pleasing and eye-popping stroll as you meander from the admission desk to the main exhibition galleries.

Founded originally in 1882, the museum has a little bit of everything, from an exhibition on Scandinavian influences on design and art to both Native American and Haitian art exhibitions (signs for the latter in both English and Creole). It’s over 30,000 works include many eminent artists, including Warhol, O’Keefe, and Liechtenstein. Overall, the experience is a feast for the senses in perhaps not so expected a location.

Milwaukee Art Museum| Address: 700 N Art Museum Dr, Milwaukee, WI 53202 | Website: https://mam.org | IG: milwaukeeart

Best Place at Historic Pabst Brewery – anyone who knows beer knows that Milwaukee has a rich tradition of such, dating back to the late 1800s with an influx of German immigrants and the growth and domination of breweries created by men named Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller.

Interestingly, it is the descendants of Miller that helps keep former competitors like Schlitz, Blatz and Pabst (the last of the big four) alive via contract brewing agreements. Milwaukee has likewise done a good job of keeping its beer history alive with the reuse of many former brewery buildings, which includes Best Place, which resides in the former Pabst Brewery.

As explained on the tour (online ticket pre-orders and day of walk ups are both allowed as long as spaces are available), the latter days of Pabst Brewing were something of a torturous affair for both the company, its employees, and the city itself. After decades of prosperity, the company found that the same economic system started strangling it in more recent times, due to acquisition from an uncooperative venture capitalist group. Unhelpful social trends that discouraged hefty beer consumption like disco music and various diet crazes certainly did not improve matters either.

The fact that Seattle grunge hipsters proved to be the company’s salvation seems as improbable as the fact that the space was essentially and eventually left abandoned by those same venture capitalists in the end. Restoring Best Place (named after the founder of the company Jacob Best; Fredrick Pabst essentially married into the family after working as a ship captain) has been an ongoing process since – the tour takes you into the mostly restored spaces where Pabst accountants and admin workers once toiled.

This is definitely not your typical brewery tour (in a good way), and is made even better with a free pint from the tap (either PBR or Schlitz, with both turning out to be fairly decent as adjunct lagers go) during the initial introduction. More beer is available at the end of the tour, and Columbus folks should venture to the courtyard to see how Milwaukee’s King Gambrinus (bedecked in Pabst Blue) compares with our Columbus Brewery District’s rendition.

Best Place at Historic Pabst Brewery | Address: 917 W Juneau Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53233 | Website: https://bestplacemilwaukee.com | IG: bestplacepabst

Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory – While the conservatory which bears the Mitchell Family name dates back to the 1860s, it wasn’t until a century later until the current structure, a series of iconically -styled domes that now house this collection of flora and fauna, were built. If anything, The Domes, as the locals are apt to refer to them, are as much a hallmark of their era as the plethora of old Milwaukee brewery buildings still standing are of theirs.

Totaling three, each dome provides its own unique way to experience plant life found commonly from all parts of the world. Improvements and innovations have allowed the domes to function well, but the substantial money needed to keep these unique constructs operating has made some fear that financial concerns may outweigh the structures’ architectural value. For a city that has preserved much of their architectural heritage in one form or another, this would seem to be a sad and unfortunate outcome were it to happen.

Mitchell Park Horticultural Conseratory | 524 S Layton Blvd, Milwaukee, WI 53215 | Website: https://www.mitchellparkdomes.com | IG: milwaukeedomes

Other Notables: If you’re inclined to visit Best Place, you might as well pair it up with a visit to Captain Pabst’s Mansion in the Avenues West (where brewery tycoons initially settled) section of town. While this tour does not come with a pint of PBR, it does come with a great deal of backstory of how Frederick Pabst sailed himself into ownership of one of the largest breweries in the world. If you’re intent on doing both, I’d recommend the Mansion first, then a visit to Best Place….Who doesn’t love a good Riverwalk? Stretching 20 blocks through the city’s Third Ward, Downtown and Beerline B neighborhoods, Milwaukee’s version offers plenty of old-school architecture, scattered artworks and sculptures (including the gripping tale of Gertie the Duck and the city’s favorite fictional son, The Bronze Fonz), and an occasional boat or two sailing slowly by…Similar to Columbus, Milwaukee has a smattering of public markets from which you can sample local restaurants from a centralized location. The Public Market resembles Columbus’s original North Market in size but feels a bit more like Cleveland’s East Market inside – here we indulged in some Lake Michigan seafood at St. Paul Fish Company and a pint from one of the best beer companies in Wisconsin, if not the US, in New Glarus Brewing. Meanwhile, 3rd St Market Hall is more of what you’d expect from a modern office building construct, with a similarly diverse vendor lineup (we ended up with very generous portions from the Vietnamese and an opportunity to watch the folks at the local ESPN Sports Radio 94.5 FM in action…Columbus independent bookstore lovers will find a visit to Boswell Books worth their while, which resembles a pumped up (square footage wise) version of the Short North’s Prologue Bookshop. San Francisco Bay Area types on the other hand will get a distinctly Book Passage (Corte Madera version) vibe from the place…

Final Notes – The Pabst Brewery grounds isn’t the only historic brewery you can visit in Milwaukee. Schlitz Park, which is what most of the reuse of the massive Schlitz Brewery facility went towards, is not internally tourable like Pabst is – most buildings are now occupied with active businesses. However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with walking around the complex, with most buildings having information signs explaining the building’s function in the old Schlitz facility. Buildings from the old Blatz Brewery can also be seen from the outside as well on the campus of the Milwaukee School of Engineering. And in a moment of oversight on our part, we didn’t even check to see that Miller Brewing has a tour for their very active brewing operation. Maybe next time…We needed a night to just kick off our shoes and hang in our hotel for the evening, and decided pizza was in order. Maggio’s Wood Fired Pizza will remind Columbus folks of the excellent pies you can get at Harvest Pizzeria. Out of the two pies we ordered, The Good Land edged out the Jerk Chicken pie, but only by so much. And if you go into the store, you can find out why you can order a single orange (yes, an orange) from the online menu…Last but not least, West Allis’s The Bread Pedalers shares a similar story to a place in the Bay Area we’ve visited before (M.H. Bread and Butter, in San Anselmo) – just substitute professional cyclists in the former with ultramarathoners in the latter. While The Bread Pedalers is a little bit younger and was a case of adapting during COVID times, you get quality baked goods and coffee, a charming cafe-style space, and a loyal neighborhood following in either instance.