Attention! Greater Milwaukee Committee, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce, and all you complacent suburbanites: The torch has been passed to a new generation, and you didn’t even know it was lit. So, turn off your AM talk radio and get on board the train to the future. Our very history is at stake.
That was the message delivered to a standing room only crowd at the Pabst Theater on Monday, Jan. 30, in an event called “Remarkable Milwaukee.” The event was sponsored by Historic Milwaukee, Inc., which has established itself as one of the city’s more forward-looking institutions. (This alone says something about both the organization and the community it celebrates.) In September 2011, HMI sponsored Doors Open Milwaukee, a behind-the-scenes look at the nooks and crannies of our built environment. It was an unqualified success and brought thousands of young people downtown to poke around old buildings.
For Monday’s event, the stage was set with fourteen chairs, arranged in two arcs. Arrayed thereupon were panelists engaged for the evening in a round-table discussion of the city’s state and future. Bartender Evan Barnes mixed drinks on-stage for the speakers while photographs by Grace Fuhr and Howard Leu filled a screen with images of the vast array of historic buildings that are a particular treasure of this city.
Hovering in the wings, and mingling with the ghosts of Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne and Helen Hayes were two unseen characters: The aging white suburbanite who used to run this town and the equally mythic 35-year-old who is somehow going to materialize with sufficient venture capital to take things over.
Developer Gary Grunau got things rolling with his observation that companies must move downtown from the suburbs and elsewhere if they are to succeed because that is where the workers want to be. Did you hear that, Kohl‘s?
“Young people want to walk and bike to work and you can’t do that in the suburbs,” he said, raising a generational theme that would echo through the splendid acoustics of the jewel box theater all evening.
Restaurateur Mike Eitel, who was among the first new generation of young entrepreneurs when he opened the Nomad World Pub on Brady Street “by accident” in 1995, thanked fellow panelist John Norquist for encouraging a livable city when he was mayor, and enhancing its “bike-ability and walk-ability.” These are important factors for his employees, he said, who tend to live very urban lives, “and who do wonderful stuff in the community.” That is, until they settle down and have children, cautioned Grunau, who said “the only reason people will leave downtown is the Milwaukee Public Schools.” So much for that.
Still, the exposure to urban living that is a commonplace among young people these days is a far cry from just a decade or so ago when developers like Barry Mandel took the first, tentative steps toward repopulating the city center. This was an era when downtown was perceived as unsafe, and an automobile considered a transportation imperative. News back then, the audience was told, came from broadcast television, things called “newspapers” and AM talk radio.
Restaurateur Joe Bartolotta said “young people communicate entirely differently than they did 10 years ago.” They tweet, they text, they instant-message, and as a result, “young people are impervious to the pain of [AM talk radio’s] Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes,” according to Pabst Theater executive director Gary Witt. This statement drew a cheer from the standing room only crowd, as did Eitel’s observation that “young people don’t watch the weather forecast, thank God.” That’s good for the restaurant business, he said, since television broadcasters have recently discovered that it snows in Milwaukee in the winter, and that it pays to keep people scared and in their homes watching television ads, rather than going out in the elements and tying one on with the hip kids.
Panelists discussed catalytic projects in the city, both realized and proposed. The Holton Marsupial Bridge was an example of the former. Architect Grace La, whose firm designed the pedestrian bridge slung beneath a massive 1926 viaduct, said there was initial concern about the “Media Garden,” a gathering space underneath the superstructure. People were afraid it would be a “troll space,” she said. Instead it has been the site of a successful bike-in movie series, a gathering space for impromptu music, a practice space for athletes and acrobats and a general nexus between the East Side and the gentle people of Riverwest.
Norquist added his assent to the value of the span saying “the Marsupial Bridge increased the value of the city way more than the $800 million Marquette Interchange.” His proposed catalyst for the city: “Every street widening, every right turn lane downtown should be retracted, returning the city to pedestrians.” After the end of World War II, he said, the city had 350 miles of street railways. “Bring them all back.”
MR. CUDAHY’S EVENING
After the Pabst Theater event numerous revelers moved to historic Turner Hall for Phase II of the evening’s festivities honoring the Pabst Theater Foundation and its guiding forces: philanthropist Michael John Cudahy and director Gary Witt. The $90 a plate dinner and silent auction filled the venerable structure which has enjoyed a renaissance of its own. The fabled hall had remained dark for six decades, or from when the 88-year-old Cudahy was a teenager. But his foundation, following the lead of a resurgent Turners organization, has kept the place lively of late.
While attendees supped on salad and chicken from Zilli Hospitality Group, Witt outlined the series of events that led him, a Chicagoan with no theater background, into the role of the city’s chief impresario. It was mostly a matter of whim on Cudahy’s part, (the man has a whim of iron) seasoned with a dose of Early Times Kentucky Whisky, one suspects. “It’s never too early for Early Times,” joked Cudahy, clutching a bottle of the intoxicating spirit.
Witt said the thing that “sealed the deal” for his arrival in this city was the Alterra at the Lake coffee shop, and how cool is that? He added that Milwaukee was in the midst of a “renaissance, revival, rebirth,” and any number of other synonyms. Without mentioning the publication by name, he said that Milwaukee Magazine “sadly missed the mark” in its enumeration of this city’s leaders in the January issue [“The Hot Seat” by Kurt Chandler]. This was an odd pronouncement, since the guest of honor was among those cited in that category. Our new leaders, he said, are those who have moved downtown. Repeating an earlier theme, he said, “they don’t read the paper or listen to talk radio. They are impervious to news of shootings.”
Cudahy, the old leader, talked about how he came to become the owner of a historic theater: “Fred Luber (a cousin by marriage) called 10 years ago about buying the Pabst Theater.” Luber told Cudahy about the $9 million the city had put into the venue while it was under its ownership, “including some of my money.” Cudahy felt the price was a bit dear, but Luber allayed these concerns saying “How about if you could buy it for a buck?”
“Next thing I know,” Cudahy said, “I was on the stage of the Pabst Theater and gave Mayor Norquist a dollar.” (The transaction was much excoriated on talk radio, which chastised the mayor for his “giveaway.”) Since the transfer of power, the theater, which was dark a good fifty weeks of the year, is now host to a full calendar of events. Cudahy said he “had a gut feeling that this guy can do it,” referring to Witt, who managed, in the first season, to lose $600,000. “The second year, we lost $400,000,” Cudahy said, adding that the venue is now operating in the black. “When I croak, I hope it keeps going. And if it’s in the black it will keep going.”
Among the attendees were Barry Mandel, pleased with last Friday’s closing of financing on the North End development at the former Pfister and Vogel tannery, and sporting a very stylish pair of spectacles. Charlie Trainer, a developer who has augmented his considerable fortune by buying, selling (and sometimes re-buying and re-selling) historic properties in Milwaukee and elsewhere delegated Matt Jarosz to the task of ordering a beer for him, having failed to attract the attention of a very busy bartender. Judge Chuck Kahn and his wife Patty Keating Kahn, themselves owners of two historic downtown buildings, checked out the silent auction tables and brought the news that his colleague Judge Jean DiMotto was just that day released from the hospital after 20 days following a series of complicated surgeries. In addition to the tireless care of her husband Judge John DiMotto, she will be tended to by her son-in-law’s mother, who, like DiMotto, is a registered nurse, but unlike DiMotto lives in Australia. Downtown alderman Bob Bauman was joined by his colleague Nik Kovac, who wound up being seated with Mandel, and proximity kept his ear bent for the duration of the festivities.
