Author and historian John Gurda has spent over 50 years researching and compiling the history of Milwaukee, sharing it with his following in a range of books, articles, documentaries – and now, a local guidebook.
John Gurda’s Milwaukee outlines the local expert’s 25-mile grassroots tour throughout the city. The 83-page guidebook includes detailed route maps, historic photographs and compelling stories. The route is drivable in one day and bikeable between two days.
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The guidebook is based on Gurda’s experience as a tour guide for thousands over the years, fashioning “a route that takes in everything from Lake Park to Pigsville, from beer barons’ mansions to Polish flats, with a determined emphasis on the human side of the city,” according to a press release. “The tour is guaranteed to let you know everything you need to know about Milwaukee’s history in one seamless experience.”
“This is very much a legacy project,” Gurda said. “The guidebook crystallizes most of what I’ve learned about Milwaukee and transfers it all from my aging brain to the public domain.”
The guide is the “culmination of a half-century of poking around Milwaukee,” Gurda explained. “I think it will be an eye-opener even for people who thought they knew the city well.”
In the introduction to the guide, Gurda, who writes the “Historic Milwaukee” column that appears monthly in Milwaukee Magazine, noted that studying Milwaukee has been his full-time job since 1972 and that most of what he’s learned has found its way into books, articles and documentaries, but that bus tours emerged early on as another way to tell Milwaukee’s story with the city itself as an “incomparable visual aid.”
John Gurda’s Milwaukee is published by the Milwaukee County Historical Society. The guidebook will be officially released at the society’s headquarters (910 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr.) on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Copies will be available for $24.95 at the Historical Society gift shop and at Historic Milwaukee, Inc. (235 E. Michigan St.) and Boswell Books (2559 N. Downer Ave.).
