photos by Dan Bishop
Day One: Mile 0.0
It’s 8:53 on a Wednesday morning, and I feel a little like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, dropped in the middle of nowhere awaiting a date with a crop duster. I’m at the corner of County Line and 27th (here called Range Line Road) and the terrain isn’t exactly Hitchcock’s barren South Dakota plain, but it has a similar feeling of nothingness and tends to raise the same question: What the hell is this guy doing here?
The answer to that question has raised eyebrows. I am here because I’m walking Milwaukee County, from one end to the other. “Really? The whole county? Even the boring parts?” “Yes,” I say. “The whole county.” Twenty-five-point-six miles as the Google flies. But the next question is tougher: Why?
Actually I’m not sure. Because I’m curious. Because I want a sense of the whole – the way the city morphs as it stretches across the county. It’s a remarkable collection of people and places – with jarring jump cuts and odd montages – as I was soon to discover.
Why 27th Street? Scan a map of Milwaukee County, and you’ll see one vertical line cuts neatly from north to south. When Wisconsin was divided into towns and townships in 1837, this was the dividing line. It was a thoroughfare of sorts even before there was much to fare through.
So I’m here, no biplane in sight.
Top of the county, ma! And I’m feeling, well, a bit lonely.
It’s not surprising. River Hills was incorporated in 1930, and by village law, housing lots must be five acres or larger. Today, many hide in the woods like phantoms. They are big, impressive, but might as well be empty for all the people I see. At a distance, two speed walkers pop through the foliage with day-glo, spandex plumage. Later, I meet a public works employee, trimming brush from the edge of the road. Mike is burly, bearded and red-haired. He confirms that residents here “keep pretty much to themselves.”
As I head south, I realize this is one of the few public spaces in the village – the street. The Milwaukee Country Club, of course, is open only to members. I’m tempted to pay a visit, but think better of it.
At the north border of the club’s land, Range Line crosses the Milwaukee River, and it’s one of the loveliest views in the city. I sit on the cool limestone railing and look out at mirror images of sky and water, edged in a dense curtain of trees just coming into bloom. You can imagine yourself in a 17th-century English landscape.
A few days later, curiosity about the country club gets the best of me and I call the general manager, Chris Boettcher. “The club leadership would tell you – in a nice way – they would prefer this to be a private club and really wouldn’t be interested in the exposure.” Ah.
Day One: Mile 2.3
Cross Green Bay Road, thrumming with traffic, and another vista opens up: Brown Deer Park. The houses have emerged from all that wooded privacy and address the park with their own landscapes. Compost bins hide in corners, while mulched beds present the right combination of hostas and arborvitae. We’re in Glendale, with still an occasional farmhouse predating the 1950s “garden community” development.
The view of the park befits a ritzier neighborhood, but these are everyday Milwaukee homes. There’s a driveway basketball hoop rusty with age; a small fishing boat wedged into the corner of a lot; mailboxes and birdhouses in craft-fair colors and shapes.
The suburban arcadia comes to an end at Mill Road, where Range Line Road runs straight into Glendale’s industrial park, a world of power substations, cyclone fences and signs that warn “Blasting Area Ahead.” Railroads crisscross the industrial lots. There’s no friendly way for pedestrians, save an ominous staircase leading to an elevated Teutonia Avenue.
Climbing it, you enter a different world. Road and sidewalks are covered with pebbles that ping against trucks as they thunder by. I see retail shops for the first time: The Silver Mill shopping plaza houses everything from African Hair Braiding to the Department of Motor Vehicles. And there are pedestrians. In a matter of a few steps, I’ve entered the city.
Day One: Mile 4.5
Teutonia has shopping plazas and box-like, four-unit apartments that eventually make way for modest, single-family homes. There are mature trees and uneven concrete sidewalks that make bicycles rattle. Churches and gas stations dot the corners. It reminds me of the Wauwatosa neighborhood where I grew up. Except, of course, here the people are mostly African-American.
Further south, things change. I see day care centers carved out of former chain restaurants. The Learning Center was once a Ponderosa Steakhouse. Little Blessings Academy bears the trademark round window of a Chinese restaurant. Milwaukee Lead Works, a low mass of white cinderblock, shut down in 2001 after more than 70 years. Wisconsin Magneto is now in Mequon.
Off the commercial strip is a quiet street of small, well-kept houses. At one, a woman chats with me while her grandchildren pop in and out of the doorway. She’s a school bus driver with a low, measured voice. “This used to be like the suburbs, but now it’s more the inner city,” she says. “I know the kids in the area and they know where to come for help.” I tell her the places I’ve walked so far. She nods her head: “That’s mostly Caucasian up there, right?”
At Atkinson Avenue, a commercial strip has hand-painted signs over shop windows: “Legends Sportswear,” “Alpha and Omega Ministries.” On the door of Henry’s Lounge, a sign says, “You must be 30 years old to enter. No Baseball caps on Fridays or Saturdays.” A corner grocery is busy, yet has windows covered with painted plywood.
Across the street, Joyce Nyholm stands behind the counter at Nyholm Supply. A dog sleeps on the floor next to cases of motor oil and wiper fluid. Shelves and pegboards surround Nyholm with fan belts and bulbs. In a grandmotherly sweatshirt, she looks ready to serve a plate of oatmeal cookies rather than find the right spark plug for a ’94 Mustang. Her father-in-law, Conrad, started the business in 1944, and she took over when her husband died 14 years ago. She’s retiring. The shop is closing. She just turned 80.
“We’ve been faithful to the neighborhood,” she says. “We’ve had our break-ins, but the neighbors watch over me. It’s usually kids, transients you know, who are destructive.”
One of those neighbors is William Campbell, the 73-year-old owner of Monk’s Barber Shop. Round in face and figure, he sports a silver goatee, a blue vest that declares him “Master Barber” and – months after the election – an Obama campaign button the size of a CD. He’s surrounded by dark wood and photos of jazz stars in mid-riff. Behind the master chair, there’s a large picture of the man himself: Thelonious Monk.
“I’ve been following jazz since I was 12,” he says, glancing up from his cribbage hand. As he counts points – “15-2, 15-4” – he talks about Obama (“Never thought I’d see it in my lifetime”), TV news (“I’ve been a CNN junkie ever since that station started”) and the neighborhood he’s called home for 28 years: “It comes and goes, you know,” he says. “I’m optimistic, but we’ve had people moving in lately who are causing trouble. Teenagers, mostly.”
On my way out, his son William, wearing a perfectly tilted Kangol beret, asks me about my walk, and grimaces slightly when I tell him where I started. “I don’t think I could live up there,” he says. “The streets are empty; no people.”
Day Two: Mile 7.7
William is right. Walking south from Capitol Drive the next day, I’m struck by the differences from day one. I’m in a neighborhood where life is lived on the street. There are people at pay phones, people watching the street from their stoops or open upstairs windows. A gray-haired couple sits on their porch with cups of coffee, a Pomeranian on a rug beside them. Pots of artificial flowers hang from the porch beams, plastic swans sit along the stairs. They wave to neighbors across the street, even as school buses and cement trucks bounce along the road between them.
People are a little suspicious of an outsider. At a candy store, kids buy freeze pops, and my attempt to make conversation is met with puzzled stares. An older couple trims hedges around a tidy bungalow. “Gotta have an ID badge or we can’t talk to you,” one of them says.
Brenda Gordon-Cuomo is not shy about talking. Just north of Center Street, she’s outside with her four children, pulling vines out of a cyclone fence and weeding the front garden beds. She talks about her kids – her oldest son is a guitar player, a big fan of Jimi Hendrix – and points out which houses are vacant, which have longtime residents, which are cause for concern. Fond Du Lac Center – the new retail-apartment complex next door – is nice, she says, but she doesn’t like how it’s changed the landscaping alongside her driveway.
Across the street is the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, which occupies a former firehouse (1889) and movie theater (1926). Clayborn Benson shows me the part of the carpeted floor where you can still feel the ruts from the horse-drawn fire wagons. Workers are constructing panels for the museum’s next exhibit, documenting civil rights struggles in Milwaukee and Oshkosh in the late 1960s.
Benson recalls those days well, but also remembers more recent times. “We’ve seen fires, shootings, whole families buying drugs on the street, prostitutes active on a daily basis. I wish we could say we’re optimistic,” he adds, “but we’re going through a depression. And the city is not always a good partner.”
The museum moved into this space in 1989, after the Center Street Library built its own building across the intersection. Today, the library is a quiet oasis, with most people sitting at computer terminals – watching sports highlights, listening to music, filling out job applications.
Branch manager Kirsten Thompson says the library still gets plenty of interest in books, particularly new urban fiction titles, but notes, “We’re becoming a default job center. So many applications are online, and you can’t get a job without an e-mail account.”
The struggle for jobs is no mystery. A few blocks to the west, acres of industrial land are targeted for revitalization under the 30th Street Industrial Corridor project. Walking on, I see more houses covered over with plywood. Commercial storefronts grow scarce. One of the few pedestrians I pass is a squat woman in a low-cut denim dress. Her neck and chest are sprinkled with glitter and sequins, her lips are painted deep red, and she wears rainbows of eye shadow.
Day Two: Mile 10.3
But the lunch hour is hopping at Dep’s Hall of Fades, a barber shop on the corner of Lisbon Avenue. The chairs are mostly filled. Music plays. A woman carries around a tray of sandwiches ($3) and cookies (50 cents) wrapped carefully in plastic bags. “I made these with my own two little hands.”
Lots of chatter. Owner Darrell Thee catches flack for his eating habits. “Y’all come to work with this weird kind of trail mix,” someone says. “He’s the first negro I’ve ever seen who eats dried apricots,” adds another.
This is Irv. Big. Tattooed forearms. New York Yankees cap. On a break, we chat outside, and he gets serious.
“The economy has always been bad around here. There’s been a recession in the African-American community for a long time. But in this day and age, it’s about rich and poor. There is no more middle class.”
Later, sweeping up after the lunch rush, Thee talks a little politics himself.
“This time, I was looking at a black face,” he says. “That was exciting. But just because he’s president doesn’t make things better. We’re still losing like a million jobs a month. We’re borrowing billions from China. I don’t know where our country is going.
“You know what I’m against? I’m against being afraid to walk to my car when I get off work.”
The street opens wide at Lisbon, and the city feels almost noble and expansive before narrowing to a neighborhood of shops and storefronts. There are markets. Display windows. Fast food. But plywood, too. One storefront that promises “The Coffee Shop With a Difference” is closed tight – inside, tables are stacked with clothing, as if it had recently hosted a rummage sale.
Approaching Wisconsin Avenue, it seems as if there’s an ocean or desert ahead. And there is, of a sort. Walk further and the Menomonee Valley unfolds before you.
The viaduct crossing it is part skyway and part tunnel; you share it with the traffic and its din, caged in by cyclone fence. But you’re also airborne, exposed and buffeted by wind, looking down on engines moving railcars back and forth like some slow-motion pinball game. Workers eat lunch on tar and gravel roofs that look like abstract paintings. Amid piles of chemical drums and discarded shipping pallets are bucolic little scenes right out of a North Woods postcard.
In the distance is Miller Park, the Hoan Bridge, smokestacks and steeples. The refurbished Mitchell Park Domes look more than ever like the lair of a James Bond villain – any minute, one will open to reveal a giant death ray ready to incinerate a faraway city.
Inside the domes there is diversity, both human and botanical. A young couple from Vietnam uneasily navigates English at the ticket booth. A variety of accents and languages circulate among the cacti and tropicals. Two women knit and chat in lawn chairs, rejuvenating their skin with controlled humidity after the long, dry winter. A model train layout winds through a strange miniature landscape. A Lego Chicago skyline stands next to snapdragons, which bend over the trains like giant mutants. Grandparents and kids point and smile.
A few blocks past the park, historic Layton Boulevard – as 27th Street is now called – parades past classic Milwaukee duplexes, bungalows and Tudors. There are white picket fences, statues of the Virgin Mary, and flags: Puerto Rican, American, “Army of One.” At a sidewalk rummage sale, two young children play while their grandmother, Romilda, folds and arranges clothes.
“This neighborhood? It’s fine for now,” she says, looking down the street as if the answer is written on someone’s front window. She travels back and forth from Puerto Rico, staying here for a few years to help with the grandchildren, and then returning. She speaks Spanish to the kids as I walk away, and I make out the words, “no policía.”
It’s also a street of churches. The old Sacred Heart Convent casts an imposing façade along the west side of the street. On the east side, over several blocks, are a few Lutheran churches, as if the two faiths once faced off across the Layton Boulevard DMZ.
Wong Thao is in the courtyard of the largest of these, Ascension Lutheran, drawing shaving-cream lines on the grass for a children’s game – part of the church’s summer camp. Ascension is a small miracle of cultural fusion, bringing together Hmong, Latino and white communities. “Some churches are afraid to do this,” says Pastor Walter Baires, who is from El Salvador, “because it involves so many painful changes. But we think it’s worth it to demonstrate we can all live together under one roof.”
Day Two: Mile 14.2
At Forest Home Avenue, the street widens, and a few city trucks are clustered around the boulevard median. Men in day-glo vests plant small shrubs and shape rocks into a low retaining wall. It reminds me of the vested gardeners who planted rows of marigolds and cannas in the boulevard across from my grandmother’s house.
But such old-fashioned care is getting scaled down, says Joan Perkins, an urban forestry manager for the city who has stopped by. She wears rhinestone glasses and talks over the traffic: “We’re switching to sustainable boulevards, to just trees and bushes. There are 270 beds in the city, and we’ve got to make the maintenance a lot lower.” But Layton Boulevard is considered historic, she adds, “so that’s going to be left alone.”
A few blocks south, the shift change at Maynard Steel has already happened, though I can see some lingerers, hard hats and ear protectors in hand, heading to cars parked along the Kinnickinnic River Parkway. I’ve worked in a foundry like this, where temperatures swelter and black dust (from the sand used to form the molds) hangs in the air. I worked with men who cared for their craft and worked under extreme conditions. Men who drank a case of beer a week and cursed enough to make David Mamet blush. Men of different races who worked alongside each other without complaint, then went home to a neighborhood where people looked like themselves.
Down the street at Leon’s Frozen Custard, people of all shapes, colors and ages line up at the window. Ray Stelde (85, favorite flavor: macadamia nut) lives in West Allis with his wife, Virginia (84, butter pecan). “We come once a week or so,” he tells me. “We’ve been married 62 years.” I have to ask about their license plate: Is it political? “I’m Ray and she’s Gin,” he explains. “So we put them together: RAYGIN.”
Crossing Oklahoma, 27th becomes more highway than street. Pedestrians again disappear. Storefronts are wedged between megastores with megaparking lots. Sidewalks are afterthoughts, narrow throughways between six lanes of traffic and acres of hatch-marked asphalt. A quick scan of the horizon shows dozens of corporate logos, on and on and on.
Day Three: Mile 16.8
The morning is sunny, and the day promises to be blisteringly hot. Heat rises from the parking lot asphalt.
There’s a bit of respite, approaching the point where 27th Street now separates Milwaukee from Greenfield. Past I-894, more green creeps into the landscape. There are even a few family homes, looking a bit dazed, but holding their ground.
Wedged into one of the many strip malls is a Honeydip Donuts. Reddy Padhi wears a long white apron over a blue Nike T-shirt clouded with flour dust. She’s young, but her forehead is adorned with a traditional Indian bindi. She waits on regulars like Dave Galvan, grandfather of two. When the flat-screen CNN coverage turns to baseball, talk turns to the old Milwaukee Braves.
“Day I got married, the Braves were in the seventh game of the World Series against the Yankees,” he says with the skilled timing of someone who’s told the story dozens of times. “Nobody paid attention to me and my wife!”
Marilyn Volland walks in and greets everyone like old friends. She comes here for the coffee, she says. “Starbucks is too strong!” She has no use for the complications of choosing between Guatemalan or Kenyan beans. “I thought everyone got it from Juan Valdez.”
Volland likes her neighborhood: “You got all the stores on 27th Street, dollar stores, whatever you need.” And Honeydip, of course, where people stop for coffee and a long john or muffin, catch up on news of kids or grandkids, and talk back to the CNN anchors about the world’s troubles.
It’s a land of car lots, of Diamond Jim’s, Dodge City and Frontier, of sales pitches by men with firm handshakes and spit-shined shoes.
There are still a few small businesses hanging on as I continue south. Wedged between a trailer park and a big-box Salvation Army store sits a petite, 40s-era house crammed full of stuffed animals, partydecorations, and novelty gifts (a large lollipop declares “50 Sucks!”). Balloonee Toonz is the shop’s unwieldy name, offering balloon arrangements for all occasions. Owner Tracy Starke has thick black hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and is clearly a glass-half-full kind of guy. “Business is good,” he says. “Deanna [his wife and co-owner] and I are blessed.”
He brushes off the struggling economy and notes his recent successes: There’s a new sign streetside and a new specialty: yard sign rentals to celebrate births or birthdays. He leads me to a back room where a 6-foot plywood baby leans against a wall. “My brother is multitalented,” Starke says, “he owns 23 patents, and he cut and painted this. I told him what I wanted. ‘Sure, no problem,’ he says. And zip zip zip it was done.”
Day Three: Mile 21.8
The big-box look of exurbia starts to fall away. At Rawson Avenue, the sidewalks disappear, and the gravel coats my shoes with dust. We’re now on U.S. Highway 41, which separates Franklin from Oak Creek. Once the land of roadside diners and motels with “Free A/C,” it’s now a place where transients rent rooms by the week at El Rancho, Knotty Pine and the Modern 41. Instead of “Father Knows Best” families in station wagons, parking lots are filled with overstuffed vans and makeshift trailers. It’s a less-severe, 21st-century version of The Grapes of Wrath. One motel manager waves me off: “Too busy.” I try introducing myself to another, and he walks past me, a glazed look in his eye and the day’s mail in his hands. At the seemingly abandoned Sleepy Hollow Motel, a man sits in a car stuffed to the windows with papers, clothing and trash. He looks up from his crinkled newspaper and simply says, “Go away.”
But there’s life in this old road, yet. Rising up from the fields like Oz among the poppies, Wheaton Franciscan’s new medical center is just over a year old, a portent of development yet to come.
Homeowners Jim and Delores Acker have watched that building rise. And watched their backyard turn into an asphalt sea swimming with semitrailers, part of Con-way Freight’s shipping hub. We have a great view of it from behind their house, where Delores grows annuals and starts her tomato plants. Jim has a waxed, handlebar mustache and his belly pushes his suspenders to the side. They’ve found things to do in retirement. There are raspberry canes behind the garage and a refurbished ’67 Thunderbird in the driveway. Around the yard are porch swings and tiny gazebos and the Lincoln-log-like wood that Jim uses to build them. They’re the last people I’ll meet, the southernmost residents of Milwaukee County’s 27th Street. They like it here, says Delores, “But holy cripes, the years sure do go by fast.”
That sentiment brings me to one more stop. A few blocks north is St. John’s Lutheran Church, with its white clapboard walls, keyhole-shaped windows and a squat bell tower. In a patch of green behind the building – within sight of new cookie-cutter housing developments – gravestones stand in neat rows, many tilted and moss-covered, yet offering a window into Milwaukee’s past. German inscriptions suggest deep faith (“Ruht in Gott”), lives that were rich and long (Johann Trostz: 1826-1896), and others tragically short.
I feel strangely moved by the headstones, all these buried stories. Life and death, tradition and change. A town that’s lasted more than 150 years, and a neat 25.6-mile line that runs straight across it, connecting mini-worlds separated by geography, income, race and history.
This is Milwaukee. Not a singular image created by a catchy slogan, but a million individual Milwaukees – beyond all the maps, statistics and Facebook friends. It’s a place that sticks to the soles of your shoes, a place where “home” has as many meanings as the people who live here.
Paul Kosidowski is a frequent contributor to Milwaukee Magazine. Write to him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
