John Gurda

With Cream City Chronicles, Historian John Gurda discusses the reason behind some of the idiosyncrasies of the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a resident and native of the City of Milwaukee, it is rather disappointing to not know too much about it. Some of the items in the book are famous enough that I heard about it from my Mom, but it is still nice to read about it. The book takes its title from the Cream-Colored bricks that used to be popular for buildings in the local area.

The book is a compilation of newspaper articles written for the Milwaukee Sentinel paper and later on for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel when it was formed. Thus, none of the articles are too long or toilsome to read. The book is mainly organized under some overarching subject. It starts with the founding of a trading post that came to be Milwaukee and the main personalities that propelled it forward. So we see stories of Solomon Juneau; the first mayor of Milwaukee, Byron Kilbourn; the guy who hated the other founders so much that he made the roads crooked, Increase Lapham; a polymath naturalist and many more. While the book is loosely chronological, it does go out of the way to talk about big areas and other places of interest.

Along the way, we can see the problems that Milwaukee has had with separate neighborhoods, the shifting of economies and the crumbling of old factories and so on. Take the Tory Hill Neighborhood for instance. It was obliterated in 1964 because of the construction of the Marquette Interchange. Due to that, I had never heard of the place. There are stories of the Mitchell Park Domes, the story of water and how it relates to the City, the shifting ethnic footprint in many areas.

I don’t know if it is difficult to find this book though, and it is rather specialized in scope. I can’t imagine many people from Atlanta, Georgia for instance, reading this book for fun but it is really well done. I mean, I have a bias since I am from the City, but there is a lot of stuff to read about even if you don’t particularly like the City of Milwaukee. In that vein, I am glad that I found this book. It did a good job of explaining why the bridges don’t meet exactly and why some of the streets cut diagonally through the otherwise orthogonal plan.

So in that sense, the book was extremely enjoyable and understandable.… (más)

I have often driven through Milwaukee and have enjoyed the majesty of Lake Michigan but never appreciated the role of water in the city’s development and culture until reading “Milwaukee: A City Built On Water”. We notice the Lake but pass over the rivers that feed into it. In fact, Indian settlements were placed along the three rivers that flow through the modern city.

Water has been an essential element of Milwaukee’s life and work. In the days before efficient roads and railway, the Lake and rivers were the highways on which explorers, traders and shippers moved their passengers and cargo. The Welland and Erie Canals opened the Great Lakes to Atlantic shipping while southernly routes connected them to the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico beyond. Milwaukee’s brewers drew on its fresh waters while tanners, meat packers, brickmakers and machinery production relied on abundant water to prosper. Sadly, residences and heavy industries utilized water to carry away their waste. I was surprised to learn that the rivers provided the earliest water parks with the Lake then regarded as too wild and cold. As industry has moved from Milwaukee, waterfronts that previously were polluted and barren are now covered with flora and provide picturesque views for modern offices and residences.

Author John Gurda has supplemented his entertaining and informative narrative with a host of photographs, maps and drawings that bring hues and visual images to the written word. Among my favorites are the then, black and white, and now, vivid color, photos of the same scenes.

Each reader can choose the segment of the book that most appeals to him or her. As hard as it is for me to pick just one, I like the sections of the nature of Lake Michigan and Milwaukee’s streams. We drive through Milwaukee on the way to Door County, our Wisconsin Happy Place. The one thing we have noticed there is the alewives’ die-off. The sections on invasive species explains how alewives and the introduction of coho and chinook salmon have changed life in Lake Michigan while mussels have covered the bottoms and, just hoping, will provide a feast for native whitefish.

“Milwaukee: A City Built On Water” is an easy and enjoyable read. I recommend it for anyone with an interest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and how water and people can make a beautiful home together.

I did receive a free copy of this book without an obligation to post a review.… (más)