Monthly Archives: September 2019

Three Wisconsin Avenue Lutheran Churches & One Beer Palace

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We kicked off our time on Wisconsin Ave. in Milwaukee on Saturday at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, which has been on this site since 1917, though the congregation has been around since 1841, before there was a Milwaukee or even a state of Wisconsin.
St Paul's Lutheran MilwaukeeGeorge Bowman Ferry designed the structure. It must have been one of his last, since he died in 1918. In partnership with another Milwaukee architect, Alfred C. Clas, he’s better known for doing the Pabst Mansion, which isn’t far to the east of St. Paul’s.St Paul's Lutheran Milwaukee St Paul's Lutheran MilwaukeeJust a few blocks from St. Paul’s — 2812 W. Wisconsin vs. 3022 W. Wisconsin — is another Lutheran congregation, which meets at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. I gazed at the structure for a while before I noticed the solar panels. It probably took so long because that’s still an unexpected feature in ecclesiastical architecture.Our Saviors Lutheran Church, MilwaukeeOur Saviors Lutheran Church, Milwaukee

Why so close to another Lutheran church? I don’t have a definite answer. They both seem to be part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but that’s a fairly recent combination, so perhaps they were different kinds of Lutherans in the early days. Also possible: Our Savior’s was founded by Norwegians, who maybe didn’t want to share a church with Germans or others in the 19th century.

The church is tall and the interior walls are spare.Our Savior Lutheran MilwaukeeOur Savior Lutheran MilwaukeeA reflection of its midcentury design, I believe, since the building was completed only in 1954 for a much older congregation. A detail I find interesting from the church web site, after mentioning the 1951 groundbreaking and 1952 cornerstone laying: “Work slowed in 1951-1953 due to the steel shortage caused by the Korean conflict.”

Also: “The original architect, H.C. Haeuser, passed away in 1951 before work on the church could begin. The firm of Grassold and Johnson was hired to replace him and that firm finalized the design.”

The walls may be mostly plain, but the stained glass isn’t.
Our Savior Lutheran Milwaukee“The stained glass windows were designed by Karl Friedlemeier, a native of Munich, Germany and manufactured by Gavin Glass and Mirror Company of Milwaukee from imported antique glass,” the church says. “Upper windows on the west wall depict Old Testament stories; New Testament stories are shown on the upper east walls.”

To east of these two Lutheran churches, again not far (1905 W. Wisconsin Ave.), is another church of that denomination, Reedemer Lutheran Church. It too is ELCA.
Redeemer Lutheran Church MilwaukeeA fine brick Gothic structure completed in 1915, designed by William Schuchardt, who worked at Ferry & Clas early in this career.
Redeemer Lutheran Church MilwaukeeRedeemer Lutheran Church MilwaukeeWhile on the way to Reedemer, we passed by the Pabst Mansion.
Pabst Mansion MilwaukeeLooks as palatial as it did in 2010. No reason it shouldn’t. It wasn’t part of Doors Open and so not open at no charge for the weekend. We walked by.

Across the street, an event called Beer Baron’s Bash was going on in the mansion’s parking lot, featuring food trucks and booths serving beer. Interesting, but not what we had come for either, so we walked by that too.

Milwaukee Doors Open ’19

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Large amounts of rain fell on northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin on Friday, and more again on Sunday morning. In between, Saturday turned out to be a brilliant early fall day, clear and cool but not cold, and with touches of brown and gold on the still-green trees.

Milwaukee Doors OpenA good day to go to the latest Milwaukee Doors Open, driving up in mid-morning and returning just after dark.

This year — see 2017 and 2018 — we spent most of our time along or near Wisconsin Ave., a major east-west thoroughfare from the edge of Lake Michigan, just in front of the Milwaukee Art Museum, to near the Milwaukee County Zoo in the western reaches of the county.

At 2812 W. Wisconsin Ave. is St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, our first stop along the avenue, west of downtown and not too far from Marquette University. A few blocks to the west of that church is a vastly ornate Moorish Revival structure, the Tripoli Shrine Temple. “Is this a mosque?” Yuriko asked. No. “A church?” Well, no. It’s the Shriners.

Next to the temple — on an adjoining lot — is Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. From there, we headed a bit to the north, off Wisconsin Ave. but not far, to see the splendid Gilded Age Schuster Mansion, now a bed and breakfast.

Returning to Wisconsin Ave., we visited the Ambassador Hotel, whose handsome lobby is as Deco a design as any I’ve ever seen, and then went to the third and fourth (but not last) churches of the day: Redeemer Lutheran Church and, after lunch at a Malaysian Chinese storefront on the avenue, St. George Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

The end of the day found us closer to downtown Milwaukee, where we visited one more church on Wisconsin Ave., Calvary Presbyterian, with its surprising interior, and then we saw the inside of two massive edifices of the state: the Milwaukee County Courthouse and the Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, the latter also on Wisconsin Ave.

The only Milwaukee building we visited this year not on or near Wisconsin Ave. was about five miles to the south, and the first place we saw in the morning, because it isn’t far from I-94, the highway into Milwaukee from the south.

Namely, Lake Tower.
Lake Water Tower, MilwaukeeAlso called the Lake Water Tower, or the Anderson Municipal Building. It goes back to the Federal Works Agency, completed with a worn plaque just inside the entrance, dated 1938-39.
Lake Water Tower, MilwaukeeDon’t see Federal Works Agency plaques too often, but I’ve run across them occasionally.

At the time, this part of Milwaukee was an independent municipality: the Town of Lake. In fact, Lake, Wisconsin lasted from 1838 to 1954, when Milwaukee was able to annex it. In the late 1930s, the Town of Lake had municipal offices on the lower floors, and a million-gallon tank of water up top.

There are still municipal offices in the building, albeit Milwaukee’s, but the water tank has been empty for nearly 40 years, its function made unnecessary by new facilities, including the water reclamation plant in the vicinity, whose distinct odor pervaded the area around the tower. Milwaukee Doors Open visitors can go to the fourth floor of the tower, through a heavy door and into the dry bottom of the tank, with a view of the metalwork and convex roof (or is it concave? never can remember) and other features above (see these pictures).

The place had a nice echo. I asked the person on duty at the site — a tedious assignment, up there in the tank — whether small acoustic concerts were ever held there. No, afraid not. Something about the ADA, but I think it’s really a lack of municipal imagination.

Hush, Here Comes A Whiz Bang

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Been a while since I visited Archive.org, which I remember from the early days of the Internet. Or at least my early days on the Internet, back in 199-something. According to the site, the archive now holds 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and other texts, 4.5 million audio recordings, 4 million videos, 3 million images and 200,000 software programs.

Maybe not the Library of Babel, or even the Library of Alexandria — or the existing Library of Congress, with its 168 million items — but impressive all the same. A fine place to wander around. When I did so the other day, I came across digitized versions of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, the juvenile humor mag whose heyday was nearly 100 years ago.

I downloaded a cover. It’s public domain now. The explosion of pedigreed bunk belongs to all humanity.

Naturally I spent some time reading some of the jokes. They were anachronistically mentioned by Prof. Harold Hill, after all: “Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang?”

This is what I have to say about it: juvenile humor has a short shelf life. Also worth noting: 25 cents wasn’t exactly cheap in the 1920s for a kid. A quarter in 1922 had the purchasing power of about $3.80 now.

Speaking of juvenile humor, I ran across this article the other day. Interesting that the writer, or maybe the editor, expects readers to get the visual reference to Alfred E. Neuman. So, apparently, do the editors of Der Spiegel, at least their English-speaking audience.

Volkening Lake

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I’m starting to see Halloween decorations on suburban front lawns. Too early. Maybe people want to decorate while it’s still warm, but it won’t be that cold in October.

Been cool in the evenings and warm during the days. The other day I took a noontime walk around Volkening Lake here in the northwest suburbs, since I was running errands nearby.

Really a large pond, but pleasant to walk around. A 0.7-mile trail goes all the way around.
Birds like it too.
Goldenrod is in full bloom now, taking the blame for ragweed pollen, which has been pretty bad this year.
Apparently the site of the pond has long been low-lying and damp, even when it was farm land. Volkening Lake seems to have been created about the same time as the surrounding suburbs, in the 1960s, which is really no surprise, though put in its present form in the ’80s. The Volkenings were the farmers who owned the property before it was suburban.

Incident in the Suburbs

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My primitive camera really wasn’t up to the task, but I took pictures anyway. The thing to do here in the 21st century. This image was taken at about 7 pm this evening, September 23, in the twilight not long after the equinox sun had set.

A chaos of lights. Tail lights, street lights, fire truck lights, police car lights and ambulance lights. There had been a traffic accident at a major intersection here in the northwest suburbs. One we travel through often. Fortunately for us, we had no part in the incident — weren’t even inconvenienced by it, since we turned into a strip-center parking lot adjacent to the intersection, without having to pass through the intersection.

We’d come to have dinner at a fast-casual restaurant near the strip center that we rarely go to, but which we were inspired to visit this evening. I left the restaurant for a moment and walked to the sidewalk on one of the major streets near the intersection, to see what all the hubbub was about.

A rare chance to rubberneck (figuratively, anyway) without being in a car or annoying the drivers behind you. Not that I could really tell what the hubbub was about, other than one metal device on wheels had hit another one in the recent past, and first responders were responding.

Lake Baikal 1994

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It was distinctly cool in Siberia in September 1994, but not cold enough to keep an Australian in the tour group from jumping into Lake Baikal.

It looks like he’s out in the middle of the lake, but we weren’t far from shore, on a small tour boat — seen here docked.

The Lake Baikal statistic that impressed me then, and still does, is its volume. It’s an enormous crack in the crust of the Earth, full of water. How much? 5,700 cubic miles. If that’s not impressive by itself, that’s more water than all of the Great Lakes combined.

Most of my pictures were from the shore.

I came away with the impression of a Great Lake, but with mountains off in the distance. Take Lake Superior, say, and move it eastern Colorado.

A Motley Thursday Assortment

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Congratulations to Geof Huth, who will be a grandfather come 2020. The latest of my contemporaries to do so, but hardly the last, I bet. Who are my contemporaries? People who could have gone to high school with me. An idiosyncratic definition, but I’m sticking with it.

News items pop up on my phone — misnamed, isn’t it? — my communications-information-time sucker gizmo, the work of bots and algorithms that are as mysterious as the Sibylline Books. Usually, it offers nothing I want to read, since the ways of bots and algorithms may be mysterious, but they’re still pretty dimwitted.

Sometimes, though, the offering is just downright bizarre. Recently the phone told me that one Susan Kristofferson had died. Given the name, I thought she was some relation of the singer of that name. I was just curious enough to check (on my laptop), and no — nothing to do with the singer. Nothing to do with me, either. Neither friend nor relative nor even nodding acquaintance.

So why did the phone tell me about her? Only the bots and algorithms know, and they aren’t telling.

Looks like Tom’s Diner in Denver, whose 1973 atmosphere I enjoyed in 2017, will soon be no more. Too bad to see a good diner go, Googie or not.

Late last year, I groused about a Chicago joint that serves $8 slices of pie, a price that compares unfavorably even to Manhattan. In Lansing, Michigan, recently, I paid about $8 for creme pie — but for that price we got two slices that we shared.

Tasty pie. Served by the Grand Traverse Pie Co., with 15 locations, all of which are in Michigan, except for an oddball in Terra Heute, Indiana. Sure, it’s cheaper to operate in a small city, but that alone can’t account for the difference between $4 and $8 slices.

Until recently, I hadn’t heard “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits in years. You might call it advert-scat. It’s funny.

I first heard it in college, because my friend Dan had some Tom Waits records, most memorably Small Change. Listening to it now, it occurs to me that some of the phrases have mostly passed from common use in the advertising world, such as please allow 30 days for delivery or the heartbreak of psoriasis or no salesman will visit your home.

So in 100 years, will the song mostly be 20th-century gibberish? Maybe. Still, with a light beat, steady bass and driving sax, I’d listen to Tom Waits sing gibberish.

See All the Hip New Joints!

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If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, I’d think that Lonely Planet is straying away from its backpacker roots into travel articles infused with that wan emotion felt by wan people, fear of missing out.

Take this article about the Scott’s Addition neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Not long ago, I wrote about an apartment development in the area, and in the course of my research discovered that the district is hip, up-and-coming, the haunt of millennials who have more adventuresome tastes than all previous generations, etc. That wasn’t something I’d known. On the whole, that’s probably good: economic and real estate development for the area, new businesses, people walking around, maybe even a few older buildings saved.

Still, the tone of the article is offputting. Here’s how it starts: “Passionate entrepreneurs have muscled onto the scene: hot art-themed hotels are wowing guests, bold chefs are shaking up the culinary landscape and brewers offer sours and saisons in brand-new tasting rooms.”

A sentence that could be published in precisely any travel guide about anywhere thought to be hip. There’s nothing distinctive about it. Remember in Masada, when one of the other Romans was committing a particularly heinous act, Peter O’Toole’s character stopped him while yelling, This is not Rome! My urge here is to declare, This is not Lonely Planet!

Lonely Planet cares not for art-themed hotels or bold chefs or brand-new tasting rooms. Lonely Planet might take a look in the hotel lobby, but then it finds a cheap lunch and eats it on a bench as life on the streets goes by, which Lonely Planet watches with delight. Lonely Planet smiles at the thought of bold chefs who create must-have creations. How do we know that they are must have? Everybody says so. Guaranteed to be expensive too, and Lonely Planets cares not for that.

That’s not my only beef with this particular article. It’s called “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot.” It should be called, “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot, while well and truly drunk.”

The following is an outline of the article’s suggestions: First, go to a distillery and drink. Then drink cider made from apples so rare only one secret tree in Serendip grows them. Then have dinner, with “craft beer and adult milkshakes” at a “postmodern diner.”

See some art, because art is good, then resume drinking — Chinese food with craft beer. Then more beer. And some more after that, at very arty places. Or maybe saisons or farmhouse ales. Then stagger to another brewery. Don’t forget to eat after that, because the food’s special around here, but also finish things off with more beer!

It’s definitely the tone that bothers me. No doubt all of the recommended places are quite good, if that’s what you want. Some of my old friends have epicurean and gourmand tendencies, after all. The tone of the article, on the other hand, is Hit! All! The! Special! Places! or your trip will be crap, your time wasted and your soul unnourished.

Birthday Tart

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A birthday tart, using blueberries and raspberries obtained at a nearby weekly farmers market, though they aren’t really visible under the light cover of powdered sugar. Yuriko made it for herself.

I added the candle. Ann expressed surprise that such question mark candles are sold, but she’s young yet. I suggested that exclamation candles might be on the market as well. Who knows, maybe even interrobang candles.