During last year’s filming of Public Enemies, a film depicting the true story of FBI agent Melvin Purvis’ attempt to apprehend criminals John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd, many Wisconsinites learned for the first time...

It goes without saying that Milwaukee has had a long, personal, at times tumultuous, relationship with the beer industry. The story is told by the names —Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, Miller—given to our city’s venues and parks, and in the abandoned buildings and cracking facades of the...

Fibers of Milwaukee’s manufacturing legacy are laced throughout our city like an electric grid. It is so fundamental and ingrained that we don’t see it separately from our civic identity. Without it, though, we would be left with gaping holes in our culture. West Allis wouldn’t be called West Allis and Cudahy...

There just doesn’t seem to be an end to Milwaukee’s awesome collection of unique commodities that unite us under a banner of civic pride. All of these things—our bubblers, our museums, our motorcycles, our beer— make up our identity; they’re a part of who we, as a city, are.

Can natural beauty improve human nature? Milwaukee’s Washington Park was designed and built on the principle that it can. Originally named West Park, Washington Park, along with Lake Park and River Park (now Riverside), were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the renowned landscape...

Sitting in the shadows of cargo containers and silos, surrounded by embedded railroad tracks and security fences, a diminutive city lot called Kaszube’s Park is the remaining footprint of what was once the heart of commercial fishing in southeastern Wisconsin. The “island” is actually...

There are two sides to every story. That adage couldn’t be truer than in a place like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Both the city and the state’s names reflect the indigenous people who first called this land home. The history of American Indians in this area relies heavily on the written words of early...