Thoughts on the Cream City
One of the joys of coaching speech and debate is that when your students qualify to National tournaments you have an excuse to go places that would not ordinarily be on your travel itinerary. After coaching for almost two decades you also sometimes get the unique opportunity to return to those places. My team last attended a Nationals in Milwaukee in 2004 , the year I graduated from college. So much has happened in the intervening years, one of the students on that trip is working for the foreign service in Cote D’ Ivoire, another has an adorable little girl, and I am clearly not directly out of college. As people change so do cities.
In some ways returning to Milwaukee was familiar, we stayed in the same hotel an Art Deco beauty and went to a Brewers game (albeit the first time it was merely two years after Miller Park was opened). However, there was an overlay of newness and prosperity to the downtown that was not present in 2004. The plan for the city was probably already in motion but it had not come to fruition yet. The walk we took in 2004 featured stretches of empty storefronts which were frankly reminiscent of the downtown I grew up in. But now restaurants, breweries, and stores have filled in the void. Gentrification has taken hold of neighborhoods that weren’t even on the tourist map in 2004 for better or for worse. The hipster culture seems to found it’s Mid-Western home with an independent coffee spot, distillery, and creamery every few blocks in these newly developed neighborhoods. An active bike share program can be found throughout the city. As this new life for the city develops it does open the Pandora’s box of moral quandaries about development and the populations that are displaced by the policies that encourage it.
There is another question that occurred to me. Is the new look of Milwaukee entirely because of the development of the city or could it be partly due to my evolution as a traveler? Am I better now seeking out experiences and restaurants that I was fifteen years ago. Certainly some of the places we went were the same,- we went to the ballpark, ate at the Safehouse (although this year we discovered the Wisconsin Press Club and its collection of autographs), and we explored the Milwaukee Public Museum, which was the site of a longtime inside joke for the past team concerning the IMAX movie Mysteries of the Nile. But this time we ate at Mader’s, a classic German restaurant opened in 1902, and toured the Miller factory. Both of those were available to us in 2004 but were not on our itinerary. This time we also went to the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum (opened in January 2019) and Clock Shadow Creamery, for a cheese making tour, which is less than five years old. I think the truth probably lies in between the city and me. the old adage is true you truly can never step into the same river twice.
Every visit to a city reveals new things and there is never enough time to do all that you may wish. I still have not made my own cheesehead, nor have I seen the block of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, or visited the oldest active bowling alley in the United States. There may never be enough time for everything, but you certainly can try.