10:00 June 30, 2005
Chicago Tribune stories praise the NEW Milwaukee

FIRST STORY

Back to the future: Milwaukee

Everything old is new again in a city booming on its past

By Alan Solomon

Tribune staff reporter

June 19, 2005

MILWAUKEE -- I'm guessing the last time you approached downtown Milwaukee, you did one of two things.

You hung a left just before you got there, stayed on Interstate Highway 94 at the I-94/I-43 split and enjoyed a ballgame and a brat and a couple of beers at Miller Park.

Or:

You stayed on I-43 at the split, slid past downtown and sped north to Kohler or Sheboygan or Door County.

There's a real good chance, if you're from the Chicago area, you've been doing this for a generation and thought nothing of it.

Well, here's what we've missed.

Here's the old Milwaukee:

Deteriorating, largely deserted (especially at night) downtown, four major breweries, Summerfest, and, for dinner: Sauerbraten. Marinated for 10 days and oven-roasted. Served with red cabbage and spaetzel.

Mader's, since 1902.

Here's the Milwaukee waiting for us:

Recovering, increasingly lively downtown (especially at night), one major brewery, thousands of new downtown condos (at booming prices), the nation's coolest art museum building, a RiverWalk, virtually non- stop festivals (including Summerfest), resurgent neighborhoods and, for dinner: Tuna au Poivre. Ahi tuna, grilled to temperature and served on wasabi mashed potatoes with spiral julienne beets, enoki mushrooms served with a mirin gastrique and a chive-infused olive oil.

Sauce, since 2000.

Fortunately, enough old Milwaukee (the city; we're not talking about that beer brand) is still left to give the onetime "Cream City"—named for the prevailing brick color, not the Wisconsin cow juice—a sense of place. We'll talk about most of those things later, but first, let's go back to Mader's, which is still around, still doing sauerbraten right and riding the revival.

Owner Victor Mader, 62, grandson of the restaurant's founder, has watched his hometown emerge from an image of economically challenged cultural backwater rocked by brewery closings—an image that's largely accurate—to what it's becoming today.

"The town's changing," he says. "We're a little late with the condos and people moving into the city, but it's been happening, I'd say, for between 5 and 10 years.

"There's musical stuff going on all the time. Between June and Labor Day you don't have to wait over 48 hours to have some sort of musical or cultural event going on. We've got so many new restaurants. We've got people who are well-educated and well-traveled who have begun restaurants, particularly in the Third Ward."

The Third Ward—now marketed as the Historic Third Ward District—was, until maybe five years ago, largely a collection of underutilized warehouses and factories separated from the rest of downtown by expressway structure. Now bursting with condo conversions and other signs of upscale life, it's catching up to the Skylight Opera Theatre, which has been doing amazing things in the ward's 358-seat jewel box called the Cabot Theatre since 1994. (On next season's schedule: "Man of La Mancha," "Carmen" and the Marx Bros. comedy "Animal Crackers.")

Just walking around this district of buildings dating mainly from the late 1890s (at least one, the Jewett & Sherman Company Building, is from 1875) and seeing what's being done here, and sampling its restaurants, is seeing what happens when people understand possibilities.

These days, you see that all over Milwaukee.

The former Blatz brewery downtown is apartments. The former Schlitz brewery, just north of downtown (and across the street from Golda Meir School, named for one if its star pupils), is a middle school and office park.

Ken Zdroik, 35, works maintenance at the Schlitz Park.

"I remember when I was a kid, you wouldn't even want to come down in this area, it was so bad," he said. "I mean, right up the street over there you had drug dealers and prostitutes—it was just horrible."

Now, he says, some of those streets have $450,000 condos.

"I couldn't afford to live down here," he said. "There's a lot of new things brewing at Schlitz now . . . "

The former Pabst brewery, which bottled its last Blue Ribbon in 1996, is being redeveloped as PabstCity, a $317 million residential, commercial and entertainment complex.

In the heart of downtown, on Wisconsin Avenue, the former Grand Avenue Mall—which foundered as an early attempt to keep retail alive in the center—has been reborn as the Shops of Grand Avenue and is 85 percent leased. Recent openings during this remarkable renaissance, credited in part to the new and anticipated flood of residents: Lane Bryant, Old Navy, TJ Maxx and Linens 'n' Things.

There are still dead patches (Milwaukee isn't Boston or San Francisco yet), but you can feel the energy everywhere.

David Gordon, director of the dazzling Milwaukee Art Museum (see accompanying story), said the addition to his building (opened in October 2001) has generated its own boom.

"See that crane?" The crane, idle in the late afternoon, was just south of the museum's lakefront campus. "They're building million- dollar condominiums overlooking the lake, and the selling point is the view of the lake—and the art museum."

The standbys haven't left.

The Capt. Frederick Pabst Mansion, built in 1892 by the onetime beer baron and eventual residence of Milwaukee's archbishops (including two— Samuel Stritch and Albert Meyer—who would be cardinals in Chicago), remains one of the country's more fascinating home tours. The theater the brewer built, the Pabst Theater (1895), is still a prime showplace across from the appropriately Teutonic City Hall that was dedicated the same year. Nearby, the Pfister Hotel, opened in 1893, continues as the city's most elegant hotel.

The surviving big-boy brewery, Miller, is still producing suds under its own labels and some others (including Pabst), and still doing tours. Once you get past the obligatory propaganda film ("Beer drinkers have always longed for [dramatic pause] Miller time!"), it's a pretty good tour. (Actually, the movie does have a highlight: The Bob Uecker Lite Beer commercial, in its entirety. "Oop, must be in the front row . . . ")

All over town are remnants of the other age. If you're walking the RiverWalk (a work in progress but with major potential), check out the building west of the Milwaukee River on Michigan Street. The massive Mitchell Building, completed in 1878, may be the most blatant (and

splendid) ripoff of classic Parisian architecture in America (aside from maybe Philadelphia's City Hall).

A reminder: We're talking Milwaukee here. It's like French-speaking space aliens somehow grabbed this building off the Champs and plopped it in the middle of this once-German-dominated town just to annoy them.

Along the streets facing Lake Michigan, or facing the parks on bluffs above Lake Michigan beaches—how many of you knew Milwaukee had beaches?—are mansions to gape at. Here's one: the Miller House, at 1060 W. Juneau Ave., across from Juneau Park, built in 1886 by department store magnate T.A. Chapman for his daughter Laura as a wedding present. It's now headquarters of the Junior League of Milwaukee, and if you think it's a looker from the outside, you should see the inside (but you can't . . .).

Then there are century-old (and older) commercial facades, blocks of them, all over downtown. Many, five years ago, were empty storefronts and vacant storage. Today they're slick restaurants and throbbing clubs full of beautiful people that, again, blast Milwaukee stereotypes to smithereens.

One place on Milwaukee Street near the Pfister, called Tangerine, at 9 p.m. had as many servers (all gorgeous females, in black) as customers.

"It doesn't get going until, like, 10:30," said one, named Cathy.

I suggested this sounded very un-Milwaukee.

"I know," she said, failing to suppress a delighted giggle. "It's so . . . urban!"

It's a Milwaukee that, for too many of us, has been bypassed since the Interstate Highway System made the city just another traffic bottleneck to squeeze past. It was different when, to go north, traffic had to drive through Milwaukee.

"In summer," remembers Victor Mader, "we were just killed with business. We had waiting lines every lunch in summer, usually with the Chicago-area people.

"Then first they had 94. Then they had 594. Now they don't even get near downtown."

That's already changing a little, thanks to the art museum. When the word spreads, that will be good for Mader, and for Mader's, and for you.

"They're skipping a real treasure by not stopping in the city and spending a few hours," he says. "Checking the art museum, stopping for lunch . . . "

Or the opera. Or the ballet. Or the symphony. Or the beach.

This is, after all, Milwaukee.

asolomon@tribune.com

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-ga21tlkll.85jun19,1,3435397.story

SECOND STORY

Milwaukee's new symbol: A love affair with wings

By Alan Solomon

Tribune staff reporter

June 19, 2005

MILWAUKEE -- It had O'Keeffes before, and a Renoir and a Monet and many other good things.

That was when the Milwaukee Art Museum was just an art museum. Now it's become the Sydney Opera House of the Midwest—a building greater than its function—and symbol of the New Milwaukee.

"I don't think what was anticipated was the extent the museum would be loved—by not just the city but by the whole of Wisconsin," said David Gordon, the museum's director for the last 2½ years.

"It's raised people's expectations of what can be done in the city.

"When Mark Attanasio, the new owner [since January, officially] of the Brewers, came on his first visit to Milwaukee, he was brought to the building—and he said, publicly, 'The city that's capable of doing this is a city that's going places.' It had a profound influence on his decision to buy the Brewers."

Victor Mader, of the restaurant family, can't talk about the importance of spaetzle in the overall scheme of things without asking this question:

"The art center's something, isn't it?"

The same question, it seems, comes from everybody in Milwaukee who discovers an out-of-towner in his midst.

It's a museum that brought Gordon, 63, to Milwaukee from London, where he had a similar position with the Royal Academy of Arts.

It would seem a curious career move and, on multiple levels, an outrageous change. This is an Englishman who left a cultural paradise to live in a city famous for Blatz.

"To me, it's been a great improvement in the quality of life," Gordon said. "I lived in a suburb of London called Chiswick, very nice and very leafy. And took me between 45 minutes and 60 minutes to go on a decrepit subway system to my office in Piccadilly.

"If I wanted to go to the theater, I had to fight my way across congested pavement to get to the theater. When we took the subway back in the evening, you had to cope with hordes of drunken yobs."

Yobs?

"Meaning hooligans."

As against . . .

"I come to Milwaukee. I have a house which is a block and a half from the lake. It cost in Milwaukee a sum which in London would buy you a superior dog kennel. And on bad days it takes me 5 minutes to get to the office instead of 4½—in a drive along the lake."

But after work . . .

"I've seen things here in the Milwaukee Rep or in the Renaissance Theater as good as anything I've seen on the London stage," he said. "It's amazing. It actually is amazing.

"We have the Fine Arts Quartet, which is one of America's best chamber groups, which is in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"I went to a concert last night of Shostakovich and Mozart that was unbelievable.

"Or you can go to the Milwaukee Ballet, run by another Englishman. Or you can go to the other 12 live theaters that we have here in Milwaukee. This is a city that, in cultural terms, punches way above its weight."

Much of that was here, of course, before the opening, in October 2001, of the Quadracci Pavilion, Santiago Calatrava's gull-winged addition to the museum—which, being on the lakefront, is serenaded by actual gulls.

The interior, as spectacular as the outside, forced a rethinking of what was already a strong collection of antiquities, masters, contemporary and folk art.

"It was entirely reorganized, because the creation of the new building freed up a lot of space for the permanent collection, and it was entirely re-presented," Gordon said.

Already, about 10 percent of the museum's 400,000 annual visitors (not counting non-paying folks who wait outside to watch the building's wings open and close) come from Chicago and northern Illinois. Gordon expects that to grow as word of Milwaukee's emergence continues to spread.

"We want people from Chicago to come up here for the day," he said. "Come to the museum, have lunch here, go for a walk on the lake, and then go to one of Milwaukee's fine restaurants—and then go to the Repertory Theatre, which is one of the best 'reps' in the country, where you see productions that equal those of Steppenwolf.

"Or you can go to the Milwaukee Symphony orchestra. I wouldn't claim it's on a par with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but it's pretty damn good."

Or they can catch a Brewers game. On the other hand . . .

"Now that Attanasio owns it," Gordon said of a team that only seems to beat the Cubs, "it'll improve."

Expectations.

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-ga21tll6k.37jun19,1,6669609.story