Craig Visits Milwaukee

After being invited to visit my friends Jose and Kim Mendiola in Milwaukee, I flew to Chicago to meet Jose, to drive the hour and a half to his home outside of Milwaukee. I spent an entire afternoon in Chicago while waiting for Jose to finish a business meeting, wandering through the Loop, along the Chicago River and enjoying the beautiful Millennium Park and Chicago Art Museum.  In the park, I admired the Jay Pritzker Pavilion with it's band shell of a signature Frank Geary designed headdress facing an expansive Great Lawn that can accommodate 7,000 people during the Grant Park Music Festival.

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The park also contains the unique "Cloud Gate" by British sculptor Anish Kapoor , a highly polished "bean" of stainless steel that reflects with mirror- clarity.

C L O U D   G A T E    B Y    A N I S H   K A P O O R

 I loved the remarkable Crown Fountain Plaza designed by artist Jaume Plensa  with a rectangular, shallow splashing pool framed by two large black towers at either end that, through a complicated system of LCD digital wizardry, displays faces of people and scenes of the city.

C R O W N   P L A Z A   F O U N T A I N

In the late afternoon, I met up with Jose Mendiola and his First Mate (asst. manager) Jeff, who run a Trader Joe's store in Glendale, a suburb of Milwaukee. I had come to investigate whether or not the area and the store might be a good fit for me and for them. Kim and Jose and their children graciously opened their home to me for five days and I had a thoroughly great time exploring first Chicago, then Milwaukee. Jose's store is one on the most dynamic and beautiful Trader Joe's that I have ever seen, set in a new outdoor shopping/living complex called Bayshore Town Center.

Milwaukee is a "rustbelt" city in transition. Founded by missionaries and fur traders, Milwaukee is probably best known as a "beer city" from the mid-century breweries like Blatz, Pabst, Miller and Schlitz, as a time when Milwaukee was the world's largest beer-producing city. Today, beer-making accounts for a tiny fraction of the city's revenue and only Miller Brewing remains, employing around 1700 people. Today, Milwaukee is home to 13 of the Fortune 100 companies that include financial services, insurance, and manufacturing.

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Like Chicago, Milwaukee is a city of bridges and I noticed that addition to a new "river walk" and the revitalization of historic areas including the beautiful brick factories now rapidly being converted into condos and lofts in an area called the Historic Third Ward, many of the historic downtown buildings are wrapped in scaffolding or are currently under rehabilitation, reflecting a national trend of urban historic preservation.

Milwaukee in the past has been called one of the most racially divided cities in America, although this has become less true, and I also found that the city has a very large Latino community that has settled in urban-adjacent areas once occupied by the early Polish and German communities that settled there in the 19th and early twentieth century. Milwaukee also has a sizable gay and lesbian-friendly population that can be found in several communities like Walker's Point, Bay View, Historic Third Ward and River West. Milwaukee has an active arts and music scene, a summer-long River Fest and a beautiful new 100 million dollar wing to the art museum designed by Santiago Calatrava.

Milwaukee has a diverse cultural reputation that includes the setting for the popular TV shows "Laverne and Shirley" and "Happy Days". Milwaukee is also home to the brutal murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and much of the "Blues Brothers" film was shot in Milwaukee.

Interestingly, Milwaukee was the first place where now deceased comic George Carlin was first arrested by the Milwaukee Police Department for his comedic routine, "The Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On Television."

I didn't see a single Laverne and Shirley poodle skirt, or any rosy-faced hausfraus in Polish be-flowered headdresses or anyone wearing lederhosen. Folks looked and acted like Californians, with maybe a few more blonde and blue-eyed Teutonic types than I am used to seeing. We did however, end up at a brewery on Fish Fry Friday in a huge hall listening to Polka music and drinking local Lakeshore Brewery beer called "Burning Bridges" (9.4% alcohol), which may explain why I felt compelled to do the "Chicken Dance". (Da-da-DAH-da-da-dah-DAH. Da-da-DAH-da-da-dah-DAH. Da-da-DAH-da-da-DAH-DEE.) Or as some wag once said," Beer doesn't make you fat. It makes you lean....against tables, chairs and poles."

I had a great time in Milwaukee, although colored by quiet anxiety about our future plans and frustration about stumbling blocks in my career at Trader Joe's. I was not on a vacation in Milwaukee, I was there to find a path or doorway to our future and I found it difficult to actually relax as one normally would on holiday. I spent a great deal of time discussing this with Jose and with Kim who gave me some insight and good advice.

My only regret is that I did not take nearly enough pictures or find the time to actually relax and smell the flowers, as it were. I spent a lot of time in the backyard thinking, while admiring the greenness of Milwaukee - dappled shade and broadleaf trees - something we don't have in California. Kim and Jose gave me lots of space and time to do this and it was important.

Many thanks and grateful appreciation to Jose and Kim for providing me with a rest stop and a moment of reflection.

J E S S E ,  O F E L I A ,  A N D   K I M   M E N D I O L A