For 127 years, Bay View neighbors, and the occasional visitor, have gathered together, bottles and jugs in hand, at the Pryor Avenue Iron Well for its continuous flow of fresh...

When Milwaukee was young, the city’s residents were in a lively debate over the appropriateness of male public nudity. At various spots on the banks of the Milwaukee River and the Lake Michigan shore during the warm months, working-class boys and young men could often be found in puris naturalibus...

In a country as expansive and diverse as America, where it’s easy to slip into a place of anonymity, many of us look to our ancestral roots to satisfy our much-needed sense of community. Even though we may never set foot on the native soil of our relatives, we still identify with our family origins. Here in Wisconsin, ethnic social clubs...

The last two decades have seen a meteoric rise in the do-it-yourself (DIY) work ethic. With Internet information at our fingertips and television shows devoted to teaching audiences how to be self-reliant, ordinary people are learning to do just about everything for themselves...

It’s amazing what kinds of treasure can be discovered beneath a few coats of paint and a dropped ceiling. Milwaukee is home to many once-magnificent temples to commerce that faded in significance over the years, were later outfitted to fulfill other purposes and then...

The record number of Milwaukee bands that made the 1,200-mile trek to Austin, Texas, for this year’s South by Southwest Music and Media Conference & Festival (SXSW) made our city proud with their enthusiasm and compelling performances. More than a dozen Milwaukee bands played in or around the Texas-sized festival that is one of the largest and most prestigious of its kind, with 1,900 official acts from 55...

Motorcycling can be rather intimidating for women looking to try the sport for the first time. There’s the pressing question of where to begin. Do you buy the riding gear first, then the bike, or the bike, then the riding gear?

Today, it’s hard to escape the constant allure of media buzz—24-hour news, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook—available at our fingertips and formatted to suit our individual preferences. But back in the late-’70s, it was a completely different era. A kid from Bay View would have been hard-pressed to find a...