In 1999, I finished college, and my three best friends decided to live in Chicago, San Francisco and Brooklyn. I chose Milwaukee.
I couldn’t help it. The city drew me in on my first visit, made impulsively the previous summer after I saw a concert listing in a discarded magazine on a Chicago sidewalk. I drove north on a humid Saturday and by Kenosha realized I’d left my wallet and cash behind in Illinois. The 1990s are ancient enough history that a stranger offered me gas money, and that a five-dollar bill covered it. It seemed plausible that a few gallons of unleaded were all I required.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Tank full, I tooled up 94 and explored all the no-cost charms of the East Side on an empty stomach and sheer anticipation. Lions and elephants greeted me in the lobby of the Oriental. The lakefront shone and dazzled. Zaffiro’s neon buzzed and blinked at me in pink and green. I browsed Atomic Records and picked up a Shepherd Express, which I read on the sidewalk where a man cried “Pepperoni! Cannoli!” and carried a little red cooler. I ended my evening watching two legendary indie bands, The Promise Ring and Paris, Texas, at the Times Cinema on the West Side, where a handsome-enough stranger passed me a salty handful of popcorn and whoever was working the door looked the other way when I slipped inside. I fell in love with all of it.
When my Saturn finally reached the parking lot of my Chicago dorm room at 1:45 a.m., I crawled up to my top bunk, starving after a day with little sustenance, and devoured my roommate’s Ritz crackers. Then I decided I should live in Milwaukee.
It was a mysterious pull, a sacred and knowing urge in my body and mind that this was going to be my place. After finishing school, I managed to land a job in Milwaukee working on Alverno College’s vibrant performing arts series. But I had nothing else in the city – no friends or relations, no experience except that one perfect summer day.
Moving into a ninth-floor one-bedroom on North Prospect Avenue, I felt quite a lot like Mary Tyler Moore. (It was maddening how often people confused Milwaukee for Minneapolis.) In my case, I was striking out alone as a 21-year-old woman, hoping to leave behind everything in my chaotic childhood and invent a whole new adult life for myself. At the cusp of a new century, I was thrilled to have found the ideal laboratory to mastermind my new existence: a medium-sized and utterly magnificent city flush with unknown allure to discover and not a soul who knew my family.
My corner apartment’s windows faced east and south. Having finally escaped a house that played television day and night, I would sit in silence for hours watching the construction crew on the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava wing as it emerged to take flight. The lake itself was another distraction – not just the glistening water but the green shoreline before it, filled with walkers and runners, bikes and primary-colored pedal boats, all silent to me way up high but still exuding joy and satisfaction somehow.
Y2K-era Milwaukee introduced me to people, places and thinking completely uncharted in my life. The nuns at Alverno were a new little family for me. The Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop became another family, providing me with endless reading material and eavesdropping opportunities on my weekly Sunday visits. Some long weekends were spent with friends at Tony’s Tavern on Second, deep in conversations punctuated by the bell-like tolls of the ancient cash register. I loved the 9 p.m. retail liquor law that filled every corner bar in the evenings; I loved the streets upon streets of duplexes and the buttery cast of Cream City brick.
I imagine that the deep pleasure I took in the Milwaukee of 1999 wouldn’t be shared in the same way by a native son or daughter, nor by someone more established in their own life choices than I was in my tabula rasa era. And I don’t know how I knew Milwaukee was undoubtedly my quintessential young adult heaven. But I did understand that finding the courage to take that plunge of a move, to listen to my innermost heart, was how I hoped to live from that moment on.
I continued to trust that feeling. Three short years later, I fell in love with a Michigander, with a thunderclap of clarity not unlike the one that hit me on that first Milwaukee summer day. I moved to Ann Arbor, where I remain. Even though I have longed to again be a Milwaukeean many times, I’m perfectly content with what the city gave me. The lesson it left me – to take a chance on that gut feeling – is lifelong.
Amanda Uhle is the publisher and executive director of McSweeney’s and the author of the memoir Destroy This House.
