I’m walking the Streets of Old Milwaukee. It’s peaceful and familiar on a Saturday afternoon in the fall, the same moody lighting, weathered statues and Old European charm I’ve known for 20-some years now.
But today’s different – it’s one of the last times I’ll walk this exhibit. Next year, the Milwaukee Public Museum is moving to a new building on McKinley, and the Old Milwaukee exhibit will be dismantled after 60 years on Wells. A “spiritual successor” exhibit called Milwaukee Revealed will similarly recreate the dusky streets of the city’s past in the new location, but still, this lap feels like a goodbye.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
My father worked in the parking garage alongside the museum for the first 25 years of my life. On dozens of days off from school, my mom and I would drive to see him. We’d meet him at his office, walk up the stairs underneath the hanging whale skeleton, and explore for as long as his lunch break allowed.
Like a lot of kids, my favorite part was always Old Milwaukee – the calming atmosphere, Granny on the porch, that surreal sense of entering a forgotten world preserved in wood and stone. And of course, the candy store was a delight. I always remember the way the footsteps of my squeaky sneakers, my mother’s clacking flats, and my father’s heavy boots would echo around the rafters together.
My parents aren’t with me on today’s visit. My dad is in his mid-70s now, retired for the past four years, and after a knee injury, he has a hard time walking. He opted to stay home over a day of aches, and my mom stayed with him.
I pass the statue of the old man on the bench with his little dog and sit with him a moment. My parents and I always stopped here. I wonder how many other families did the same, how many children this fellow has seen grow up, how many parents he’s seen grow old.
As the years passed, our visits to the museum changed from the excitement of childhood into the reassuring comfort of routine. Even as a pouty adolescent, I still found joy walking those faux-cobblestone streets with my mom and dad.
It’s striking how little the exhibit has changed over two decades – but it’s also striking how completely different it feels to me today. Because, as I stand up from that bench and walk away, there’s only one set of footsteps echoing.
I’ll miss this museum a lot, like many of the people who passionately protested the change, but revisiting it alone now, it’s clear what I’m really missing is a time gone by, and the people I spent it with.
I pass a family on the way out – a young couple and their two kids. As I take the elevator down and walk past my dad’s old office, empty now, I hope that the new museum will become something like the Streets of Old Milwaukee for them, a charming, strange, nostalgic world that brings families
together for decades.
Driving away, I call my parents. I tell them that if they’re feeling up to it another Saturday before the walls come down, I hope we’ll take one last lap together.
