So Tell Me, Has Anyone Ever Actually Heard of Cedarburg Wisconsin?

     Apologies for the really annoying title. I decided to copy one of those stupid bot-generated Facebook posts like "So Tell Me, Does Anyone Ever Actually Put Eggs in Their Egg Salad?" But it's sort of a valid question. My wife and I had never heard of Cedarburg, located about a half hour north of Milwaukee, before our recent trip to Milwaukee. Once in Milwaukee, we discovered that Cedarburg was the home of the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts. My wife is a quilter, and I've always loved quilts and the history of quilts and quilting, so we decided to visit. 

    As it turns out, Cedarburg is a quaint little town founded in 1849 and home to about 6,500 people today. The town grew following the Civil War thanks to major railroad connections and a number of flour and lumber mills located in the community. Its rural beauty and small-town feel started attracting visitors from Milwaukee and wealthy part-time residents from surrounding states. In the 1960s, some concerned citizens began working to preserve and to restore the historic Cedarburg. Today, its downtown is bustling with lots of visitors enjoying shops and galleries.  

    The Quilt Museum was our first stop, a couple of miles outside of town. Located in a former farmhouse and barn, the museum is much too small to display its total collection at once, so it mounts several exhibits during the year. We enjoyed our visit.

    A stop in the Cedarburg History Museum gave us more of an insight into Cedarburg and its history. As it turns out, Cedarburg was also home of outboard motors. (Although Minnesota disputes that claim.) The outboard motor giants Mercury and Evinrude got their start in Cedarburg. The museum had a nice Mercury exhibit on display, along with its permanent general store-style displays.

    Cedarburg. Who knew? We thoroughly enjoyed our day in the town we'd never heard of before. Thanks to the town's citizens of the mid 20th century who had the wisdom and foresight to recognize what they had and to work to preserve it. If you're in the Milwaukee area, consider checking it out.

Schlemiel Schlimazel Hasenpfeffer Incorporated --- Milwaukee, Part 2

     More from our recent trip to Milwaukee Wisconsin. Why Wisconsin? Because we haven't been. And we found lots of things to enjoy, enough to think about making a return visit one day.

    In part 1, I wrote about our visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Another historic site we visited was the Pabst Mansion ( https://www.pabstmansion.com/ ). Yes, that Pabst. Captain (title of a steamboat pilot and captain, no military service) Frederick Pabst happened to marry the daughter of the founder of the Best Brewing Company. When his father-in-law retired and handed him the business, Pabst changed the name and built Pabst into a major brewery. He became quite wealthy, in a city of wealthy German brewers, and built his family a new mansion on what was then called Grand Avenue, now Wisconsin Avenue. It was just one of some 60 mansions on the street, many larger in size even though the Pabst boasts 20,000 square feet and 30-something rooms. Today, it is the only one still standing. The rest were demolished over the years and replaced with apartment buildings and boarding houses. Completed in 1892, it was the Pabst home until 1908 when the family sold it to the Catholic Archdiocese. The Catholic Church updated it, while still preserving much of the original family artwork, furnishings, and decor, and made it the Archbishop's residence and Church headquarters until 1975.  When the Church sold it in 1975, a group of citizens bought it for the purposes of preservation and transformed it into a house museum. The efforts to restore and preserve the Mansion to its Pabst family grandeur are extremely expensive and still ongoing, but we are all fortunate that the Catholic Church served as caretakers for so long.

    We love a good house tour, and this one does not disappoint. The first floor is basically furnished as it was during the Pabsts' residence, including family furniture and artworks. Pabst descendants still occasionally donate family heirlooms back to the House and other objects owned by the family still find their way back. The organization that owns the house is still very much engaged in efforts to restore it. The docent was super knowledgeable, and it was obvious that she loves the house and is thrilled to share it every day. If you're in Milwaukee, the Pabst is a must-visit site.

    The Basilica of St. Josaphat rivals the most beautiful churches and cathedrals in the world, as its founders intended. It was built by members of the Polish community in Milwaukee. Saint Josaphat Parish was formed in 1888 as an offshoot of Saint Stanislaus Parish and subsequently became the largest Polish parish in Wisconsin. Its first home was a modest building that burned to the ground in 1889. The parish built a second church but it was too small for its needs.   Ground was broken in 1896, and it was completed in 1901, but the interior wasn't completed until 1929. Father Wilhelm Grutza, the founding pastor, envisioned a church to mimic St. Peter's in Rome, on a smaller scale. Alas, the budget just wouldn't support construction, even in miniature, until Providence seemingly stepped in. After hearing that the Chicago Post Office was being demolished, he dispatched agents to purchase the parts. Soon 500 rail flat cars transported the materials, purchased for $20,000, to Milwaukee. The architect adapted his plans to fit the salvage materials, and he incorporated other salvage materials, and the church took shape. When completed, the dome was second in size in the US only to the US Capitol Dome. In 1929, the Pope designated it a Basilica (Basilica is a term for a special Catholic church, conferred by the Pope.), the third designated Basilica in the United States.  

    Today, there is not much left of a Polish presence in the neighborhood, and it is in the heart of a largely Hispanic/Latino section. The Church is still active, offers tours, and sponsors a big Polish-American festival every June. The Church's history is extremely interesting, and it is one of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen.  Another must-visit.

 

Schlemiel Schlimazel Hasenpfeffer Incorporated --- Milwaukee, Part 1

     For those of us of a certain age who did not live in the Midwest, we learned all that we knew about Milwaukee from the 1970s hit TV shows "Happy Days" and "Laverne & Shirley."  Shockingly, that wasn't much, and most of what we thought we knew was wrong, as my wife and I discovered on our recent trip to the city.

   

    Of course, we know not to go to tv sitcoms for authenticity. After all the creator of both shows, Garry Marshall, and his sister Penny who played Laverne, were as quintessentially Bronx as you could get. They knew absolutely nothing about Milwaukee or Middle America. The famous chant from the Laverne and Shirley opening, "Schlemiel, ..." was a chant from Penny's childhood games and walking to school. Schlemiel and Schlimazel are Yiddish words for a foolish person  and a bumbling person respectively, and Hasenpfeffer is a German rabbit stew (as you know if you are as big a Bugs Bunny fan as I am).  The Cunninghams, Laverne and Shirley, and all their family and friends would stick out like sore thumbs in Milwaukee. Well into the 20th century, Milwaukee was up to 75% German in ethnicity, with Poles, Serbians, and other assorted Eastern Europeans thrown in.  There are still a couple of schools in the city according to the internet which teach in both German and English and Serbian and English. The only two characters on both shows who represents the actual ethnic composition of the city are Lenny and Squiggy, Poles. Most of the shows' characters are English, Irish, or Italian in ancestry. Aside from one food vendor in a food hall, we saw no evidence over our four-day visit that an Italian has ever stepped foot in Milwaukee. (There is one exception. During the gangster era, Al Capone and a few other mobsters maintained residences and operations briefly in Milwaukee.)

    Nevertheless, we found Milwaukee to be an awesome city. It's small, and we happened to be there for the first two beautiful days of the year according to locals, sunny and temperatures reaching a balmy 70 or so degrees.  Milwaukeeans were out and about everywhere, in shirts and shirtless, waking, running, biking, walking dogs, playing tennis and just generally enjoying themselves.  There is more to see that we just didn't get to.

    One of our stops was the Milwaukee Art Museum ( https://mam.org/ ), located on the lakefront of Lake Michigan, one of the largest art museums in the United States. With a collection of about 25,000 pieces, it is smaller than the Detroit Institute of Art, but well worth a visit.  The main structure of the museum is the Quadracci Pavilion, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, and it contains a movable, wing-like or sail-like brise soleil that opens up for a wingspan of 217 feet (66 m) during the day, folding over the tall, arched structure at night or during inclement weather. There are sensors on the wings that monitor wind speeds, so if the wind speeds are over 23 mph for over 3 seconds, the wings close. As one approaches the museum, the impression is that of a sleek miniature cruise liner, or a large super yacht. The exterior is quite stunning, but the interior great hall is huge, barren, sterile, and starkly white. Windows on the lakeside offer great views, but the interior looks very dystopian to me, despite all of the sunlight.  Overall, I think it doesn't live up to the ranks of great museum architecture. The galleries are laid out in one of the most confusing manners I've experienced in a museum, and there were employees stationed in multiple places whose job, it appears, is to check your tickets. I've never experienced that in a museum before. I've never been asked for a ticket once past the front desk. Weird.

    Once inside, there are multiple decent collections, including mid-century design, modern, European, primitive, Haitian, and Georgia O'Keefe. Although few pieces blew me away, it was a nice way to spend a day.

Crying Girl, Roy Lichtenstein

Andy Warhol

Wilhelm Hunt Diederich, Greyhounds. Probably my single favorite piece because we have and love Italian Greyhounds.

Duane Hanson's Janitor

Claes Oldenburg, Typewriter Eraser

Part of the Primitive collection, artists without formal art training

Meeting my weird child art quota

from the Haitian gallery

From the Haitian gallery

    Milwaukee turned out to be an extremely friendly city full of history, one we wouldn't mind visiting again.

More to come in Part 2.