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Around Town
Food, Art, Entertainment
The first of many appearances of Sanford Restaurant, Milwaukee’s paragon of fine dining still today, in our pages was a doozy. Founders Sanford “Sandy” and Angie D’Amato graced the cover of the May 1990 Best New Restaurants issue, the story detailing the travails of the John Byron’s restaurant alums’ three-year ordeal to open a place of their own. (The D’Amatos’ successor as Sanford proprietor, Justin Aprahamian, was a cover story subject in March 2019.)
Our July 1994 feature story on the Violent Femmes depicted the decade-plus-old Milwaukee-born band at an inflection point, with a new album, a new drummer (founding member Victor DeLorenzo was fired for Guy Hoffman) and a new management team. Author Dave Luhrssen characterized the shakeup as a bid to find the success enjoyed by other alt-rockers of the early ’90s.
Tell us who you’d pick to be a Betty this year!
It’s hard to imagine KK River haunt Barnacle Bud’s as a new place, but the “nautical but nice decor and cozy outdoor cafe” (September 1993) were a draw even before they were so well broken in.
Just two years after she moved from Whitefish Bay to L.A., actor Kristen Johnston found herself with an Emmy for “3rd Rock from the Sun” and our January 1998 cover story.
“After 12 years as a critic and thousands of restaurant visits, there are still times when this reviewer manages to get really excited about a new restaurant. This is one of those times.” – The opening to Willard Romantini’s review of the new Ristorante Bartolotta, May 1993
The January 1994 debut issue of M, our A&E-magazine-within-a-magazine, featured a blurb on Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain’s barefoot traipse around Grand Avenue Mall before a show.
In Romantini’s March 1995 review of the food at notorious Downtown pickup lounge Victor’s, you can almost read his eyes widening at the goings-on beyond his plate: “This ‘meet’ market has garnered a well-deserved reputation as the spot in town to have a drink, dance and hopefully leave with a phone number or two.”One of the Milwaukeeans of the Year in January 1996: Willy Porter, the “folky” singer-songwriter whose CD Dog Eared Dream was “blazing up the Adult Album Alternative” charts. He stuck around, too, garnering a “Best of Milwaukee” nod in 2018.
A Milorganite Smackdown!
AN EXPOSÉ ON … Milwaukee’s favorite fertilizer? Yup, in 1996 we published a story with critics decrying the lack of information about what exactly is in the treated sewage byproduct and expressing doubt that it’s “100% organic” as the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District claimed. Activists said the fertilizer was full of toxins, including lead; MMSD vigorously defended its beloved product. Twenty-seven years later, Milorganite continues to grace lawns across the country, but the organic claim is absent from its packaging and website.
WE WERE OBSESSED WITH …
Mark Belling
OUR COVER OF THE conservative talk radio firebrand began with a feature profile in the February 1991 issue – an incisive but relatively straightforward story, but for the display quotes accompanied by closeup photos of Belling’s mouth (highlighting crooked teeth). As Belling’s “venomous style” continued to change the landscape of local radio and politics, MilMag followed him closely. He was on our cover in April 1997 touting a package of advice from local experts (“Write a Novel” by Jacquelyn Mitchard, “Hit a Curve Ball” by John Jaha, etc.). His “How to Date Beautiful Women” opens with “Don’t be a liberal” and ends with “Don’t ever take romantic advice from a column in Milwaukee Magazine. Nobody else pays attention to the stuff in there either.” Zing! Perhaps as payback, in our “Best of 1999” issue, we proclaimed Belling’s the “least sexy voice” in Milwaukee. He has remained a force for years, earning entry into our November 2015 list of the most influential people in Milwaukee, and “The Mark Belling Show” still anchors WISN-AM’s afternoon drive time.
Watching the Watchdogs
COMMENTARY ON THE city’s newsrooms was a cornerstone of our magazine for decades, but the ’90s were the heyday of the “Pressroom Confidential” column. Anchored over the years by James Romenesko (who after MilMag made a career out of news media analysis), Peter Robertson, Bruce Murphy and Erik Gunn, the monthly column spilled thousands of words a year probing news operations for bias, scandal and intrigue. The fodder multiplied after January 1995 with the merger of the Journal and Sentinel – a marriage of the city’s two foremost agenda-setters that was the subject of a cover story that October. The crescendo of our press coverage was a July 2005 “insider exposé” by Murphy following his three years as a reporter in the JS newsroom. His report from the belly of the beast told of Journal-Sentinel tribalism (years after the merger), beat turf wars and anxiety over declines of print news. Murphy would sit in the MilMag editor chair from 2005 to 2012.
Dahmer: Milwaukee’s Trauma (Still)
It was a simple question with a complicated answer. We asked it in November 2019 when profiling the “Cream City Cannibal” tour of the strip of Second Street where Jeffrey Dahmer met seven of his 17 murder victims some 30 years prior: Should we be ok with this? The tour still runs today, and the recent Netflix series on Dahmer has renewed a local discussion that mostly centers on how much we’d like to stop talking about the matter.
The continued national interest in Dahmer seems firmly planted between the case’s sensational true-crime content and the more reflective societal examinations of how an unassuming white man managed to freely terrorize the city’s non-white gay community for five years. Our coverage of Dahmer over the years has touched on both of these angles. In September 1991, MilMag pushed back on the statement by then-Mayor John Norquist that “there is nothing about Milwaukee that caused Dahmer.” Indeed, we wrote, the city’s policing and long-standing marginalization of both the gay community and communities of color had much to do with how Dahmer managed to avoid capture for so long.
In April 1992, in a follow-up to Dahmer’s trial, we profiled the more ghoulish interest in the case that doubtlessly still drives the market for walking tours and TV series: the small group of “Dahmer worshippers” who attended the trial as a rite of serial killer fandom, the woman who admitted to “love fantasies” about Dahmer, and the Illinois-based musician who scribbled lyrics as he sat in the courtroom listening to testimony. “There are only two ways to go after Dahmer,” we wrote in 1991, “Either this will bring us together or leave the city more divided than ever.” Thirty years later, it seems that we’ve done both.
Big Debut: Fred Stonehouse
ONE OF WISCONSIN’S most prominent artists made an unassuming debut in our “New Faces of 1991” feature. Fred Stonehouse, we wrote, “is probably the only professional artist in the metro area who lives in West Allis.” Stonehouse shrugged off our undeserved cheap shot (sorry, Stallis!) and built an impressive body of acclaimed surrealist paintings. After the feature, we covered him time and time again, most recently in our May 2022 issue.
