The American Civil War Museum

Posted on October 22, 2019 by admin

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind when we got to the American Civil War Museum in Richmond on October 12. I expected an easy drive from where we parked, near the capitol, to the museum, which is at the site of the former Tredegar Iron Works on the James River.

No such luck. The Richmond Folk Festival had gummed up everything along the river, blocking all vehicular access, so after some time in sluggish traffic, we went back to the same parking lot near the capitol — luckily my receipt was good for the whole day — and walked the half mile or so to the museum. Not a bad walk, but it made me tired ahead of a walk through a museum. Such is the tourist experience, sometimes.

At first I thought the museum was in the multistory brick building.
Wrong again. That building houses the visitors center and a Civil War museum associated with the Richmond National Battlefield Park, a NPS entity that encompasses that part of Tredegar along with a dozen Civil War sites around Richmond.

The new building for the American Civil War Museum — opened just this year — is the modernist structure next to the brick building, though it incorporates some of the other Tredegar ruins. Designed by a local architectural firm, 3North, the museum isn’t overly large, coming in at 28,000 square feet.

We spent a couple of hours at the museum. Though a little frazzled when I got there, I soon got into the groove of the place and mostly enjoyed my time there. Ann did too. The permanent exhibits wind through the first floor, featuring things you’d expect in a museum devoted to the history of a war: military and civilian artifacts, photos, maps (though not enough), things to read, a few interactive kiosks, audio narratives and videos and so on.

Perhaps the most striking features are the large-scale photographic images placed on various walls or hanging over display cases. They are images of people alive during the conflict, and are all colorized. Only a few years ago, the colorization might have bothered me, but since seeing They Shall Not Grow Old, I appreciate artful colorization, which the museum manages to do.

Some of the artifacts were particularly intriguing, such as the carvings that prisoners of war made from whatever material they had at hand, some of them exceptionally fine — that they then traded for food or tobacco or whatever else they badly needed. Other artifacts edged into the realm of oddities, such as a fossilized biscuit from the siege of Vicksburg and a luckless soldier’s a pocket journal, split by the bullet that killed him.

As at a number of other museums I’ve seen focusing on the 19th century, the most unnerving artifacts are the medical tools. The American Civil War Museum has a collection on display, along with a some poor bastard’s primitive prosthetic arm.

I also encountered some incidents and stories about the war that I’d never heard. Of course, the Civil War is a sprawling subject, with countless untold or undertold narratives. The museum has a knack for illustrating some of them. For instance, the New York Draft Riot is covered in some detail. No surprise there. But so is the lesser-known Richmond Bread Riot of 1863. Always good to learn about something like that.

As interesting and informative as the museum was, I came away feeling a little unsatisfied. I wasn’t sure why. On later reflection, I worked it out. It isn’t that the museum eschews glorifying the Lost Cause, which I’m sure bothers some people. I wouldn’t have expected anything else from a museum created by serious historians.

Rather, I missed the generals ‘n’ battles approach to the story of the war. Though not as pernicious as the Lost Cause, modern historians usually shy away from that too.

The museum mentions many of the military engagements of the war, sometimes in some detail, but that isn’t the thrust of most of the exhibits. Rather, the American Civil War Museum takes an almost sociological approach to the war.

That is, how the war affected all of 19th-century American society. Soldiers, naturally, but also white civilians, male and female, blacks, free and enslaved, immigrants and others. Is that a good way to organize a civil war museum? Probably yes. Still —

That I felt the absence of generals ‘n’ battles says more about me, and how I’ve conditioned myself with the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve watched and the battlefields I’ve visited over the years, than it does any historic study of the period. Even so, that’s how I felt.

The Richmond National Battlefield Park facility next door, which we also visited (though for a much shorter time), seemed more traditional in that regard, if only because it focuses on the fighting around Richmond. There you can see large maps depicting the movements of armies, for instance.

I can’t be the only one who feels this way. Oddly enough, the American Civil War Museum acknowledges that, perhaps unconsciously, in its gift shop. Generals ‘n’ battles is alive and well there.

In the form of Lee and Grant bobbleheads, for one thing.

Models of the submarine boat Hunley and the ironclad Virginia.
Generals of the Civil War playing cards, but also Joshua Chamberlain playing cards.
The Chamberlain cards struck me as oddly specific. Wonder if the same card maker has a line of, say, Jubal Early playing cards?

The shop also had a nice collection of flags. Such as this one, which you don’t see too often. I had to look it up.
The Battle Flag of the First Corps, Army of Tennessee.

The Virginia State Capitol

Posted on October 21, 2019 by admin

The Commonwealth of Virginia certainly doesn’t care what I think, but I’m going to offer it my opinion anyway, about what it calls part of its legislature. The modern name for the lower chamber of the Virginia legislature is the House of Delegates — modern, as in after 1776. Nice, but a little blah.

Before that, the chamber was the House of Burgesses. That’s a spiffier name. Virginia’s lower house ought to go back to using it. The House of Burgesses had a long and honorable history before the change. “Burgesses” must have been trashed in a fit of revolutionary ardor for new names, but that was more than two centuries ago. Even better, no other state uses it. By contrast, Maryland and West Virginia both use “House of Delegates.”

State legislature names are mostly uninspired anyway, except maybe for the formal title of the Massachusetts legislature, which is the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Nearby, there’s also the the General Court of New Hampshire, which (incidentally) Ballotpedia tells us is the fourth-largest English-speaking legislative body in the world (at 424 members), behind only the Parliament of the UK, the US Congress, and the Parliament of India.

On the morning of October 12, Ann and I made our way to Capitol Square in Richmond. The Thomas Jefferson-designed state capitol is its handsome centerpiece.

The capitol has a distinctive look among those of the several states, taking its inspiration from a Roman temple in France, the Maison Carrée.

Just outside the capitol building is an embedded Virginia seal, with Tyranny lying slain beneath the foot of Virtus.
I told Ann what the Latin meant, and she seemed amused that a state would put something so badass on its formal seal. Compared to the anodyne figures on most state seals, she has a point.

It looks like you walk up the hillside steps to enter the capitol, but in fact you walk down them. Since a redevelopment in the early years of this century, visitors enter the Virginia State Capitol via an underground passage that runs underneath the hillside steps.
We took a guided tour starting there. One of the first things you see in the underground annex — and it’s a large space, at 27,000 square feet — is the architect himself in bronze.
“The statue represents Jefferson around the age of 42 — about the time he was designing the building — and he is holding an architectural drawing of the Capitol,” says the Richmond Times-Dispatch…

“Ivan Schwartz, co-founder of StudioEIS, created the statue… The statue weighs 800 pounds and stands nearly 8 feet tall, representing a larger-than-life Jefferson. Its pedestal is made of EW Gold, a dolomitic limestone quarried in Missouri.”

The passage leads to the capitol proper. Though there’s no exterior dome, there is an interior one. Underneath it is another figure of the Revolution in stone. The figure of the Revolution.
Tracy L. Kamerer and Scott W. Nolley, writing for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, praise it highly: “In Richmond stands a marble statue of George Washington that is among the most notable pieces of eighteenth-century art, one of the most important works in the nation, and, some think, the truest likeness of perhaps the first American to become himself an icon.

“A life-sized representation sculpted by France’s Jean-Antoine Houdon between 1785 and 1791 on a commission from Virginia’s legislature, it was raised in the capitol rotunda in 1796…

“Houdon’s careful recording of Washington’s image and personality yielded a sensitive and lifelike portrait. When the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington’s friend and compatriot, saw the statue for the first time, he said: ‘That is the man himself. I can almost realize he is going to move.’ ”

The Houdon Washington spawned many copies in the 19th and 20th centuries, some of which are in other state capitols and cities, and one that I’ve seen that stands in Chicago City Hall. Others are as far away as the UK and Peru.

Jefferson and Washington are only the beginning of the statuary in the Virginia State Capitol. In alcoves surrounding the Houdon Washington are busts of the other U.S. presidents born in Virginia — Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, William Henry Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, and Wilson — along with Lafayette, who’s there until there’s another president from Virginia, the guide said.

The Old House Chamber, whose entrance is behind Washington’s back, has been restored to look the part of a 19th-century legislative chamber, but also to be a repository of sculpture. It’s replete with marble and bronze busts and statues, representing various Virginians, including George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, George Wythe and Meriwether Lewis. Non-Virginians have their place, too: namely Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens.

CSA generals include Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Joseph E. Johnston, Fitzhugh Lee, and of course Robert E. Lee looking pretty much like Robert E. Lee.

It wouldn’t be the last representation of Lee we’d see in Richmond. This particular bronze was created by Rudulph Evans in 1931 and erected where Lee stood on April 23, 1861, when he accepted command of the military forces of Virginia.

That wasn’t the only event associated with the Old House. In December 1791, the House voted to ratify the proposed U.S. Bill of Rights in the room. In 1807, Aaron Burr was acquitted of treason in the room in a Federal Circuit Court trial presided over by John Marshall. Various Virginia constitutional conventions met in the room, and so did the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861. The entire Virginia State Capitol soon became the Confederate Capitol as well.

We also visited the modern Senate chamber — the modern House of Delegates was closed — and it looks the part of a well-appointed working legislative chamber, without a surfeit of statues.

The Old Senate chamber sports paintings depicting the first arrival of Englishmen in Virginia, John Smith, Pocahontas, and a scene at the Battle of Yorktown. In the Jefferson Room is a scale model of the capitol that Jefferson had commissioned in France to guide the builders in Virginia, since he wouldn’t be there to supervise things personally.

We spent time on the capitol grounds as well. The most imposing among a number of memorials near the capitol is the George Washington equestrian — formally the Virginia Washington Memorial, by Thomas Crawford — which is surrounded by other colonial Virginians of note and allegories.

The CSA was represented on the grounds as well, as you’d expect, including a Stonewall Jackson bronze. Other memorials are closer to our own time. This is part of the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, created by Stanley Bleifeld and dedicated in 2008.

A memorial dedicated to Virginia women, a collection of bronzes, was still under wraps when we looked it — but slated for dedication only two days later, on October 14.

There was even more to see, but eventually hunger took us away from Capitol Square to a nearby hipster waffle house — the Capitol Waffle Shop — for lunch. I had my waffles with egg and sausage on top, a combination that worked very well. Also good: hipster food prices in a town like Richmond are less than in places like Brooklyn, just like prices for everything else.

Virginia ’19

Posted on October 20, 2019 by admin

Some time ago, I noticed that Ann not only had October 14 off — for Columbus Day, that barely there school and post office holiday — but the next day as well, one of those days on which the teachers come to school, but students don’t. According to the way I think, that meant an opportunity to go somewhere.

So on Friday, October 11, Ann and I flew to Richmond, Virginia, returning on the 15th, for what amounted to a U.S. history trip. Fitting for her especially, since she’s in an AP U.S. history class this year. Fitting for me, since the trip included destinations that I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, but never gotten around to.

On Saturday, we spent the day in Richmond — partly downtown, at Capitol Square, where we toured the Jefferson-designed capitol, and at the newly opened American Civil War Museum, which includes part of the ruins of the Tredeger Iron Works, cannon and locomotive maker of the Confederacy.

Navigating downtown Richmond in a car proved to be pain in the ass, with its high volume of traffic, limited parking and numerous one-way streets. Every other street seemed partially blocked by construction, either of buildings or the street itself. Also, the Richmond Folk Festival was that weekend — and a lot of folks showed up for it, crowding the area near the riverfront, where the American Civil War Museum happens to be.

Downtown, as seen from the steep banks of the James River.

Despite traffic snarls, Richmond struck me as an interesting city, full of life in the present and echoes of its storied past. A day wasn’t nearly enough, but there were other places we wanted to see in Virginia.

On Sunday, we drove to Charlottesville, with Monticello as the main destination. For Ann, a completely new experience. For me, a second visit. But the first time was in 1988, so I’d forgotten a lot. And some things have changed there.

We also visited the University of Virginia that day, which I didn’t do more than 30 years ago (not sure why not). See one famed Jefferson site, best to see another close by. Closer than I realized: from Monticello you can just see the white dome of the Rotunda, the school’s most famous structure.

On the third day, technically Columbus Day Observed, we drove the other direction from Richmond to Williamsburg. More specifically, Colonial Williamsburg, the open-air museum of large scale and ambition, an odd amalgam of past and present.

There’s a lot to Colonial Williamsburg, including structures and displays and artifacts and craft demonstrations, but also programs by reenactors. The high point of the visit was one such, held at a reconstructed 18th-century tavern and featuring the Marquis de Lafayette and James Armistead Lafayette.

Afterward, they were willing to pose for pictures.
On October 15, we flew home in the afternoon. In the morning, I drove by myself to a place I’ve wanted to visit for years, the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, a stunningly beautiful cemetery perched on a hillside above the James River, populated by numerous historic figures.

After Ann woke up and we checked out of our room, we visited one last spot in Richmond: the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, small but compelling, managing to convey the misery of his life and the legacy of his art.

The Midsummer Carnival Shaft

Posted on October 9, 2019 by admin

Time for an autumn break. Back to posting around October 20, if all goes according to plan.

Last week in Milwaukee, I happened across an oddity that wasn’t part of the Doors Open event, but rather something in the median of Wisconsin Ave. near Calvary Presbyterian.

A tall, freestanding Corinthian column with a sphere on top. Other statues in the median, not pictured here, include ones honoring Union soldiers, Spanish-American veterans and George Washington. So this column must honor something along those lines, right?

Hard to tell just looking at it. A plaque on the plinth is enigmatic: Presented to the City of Milwaukee by the Carnival Association, June 26, 1900.

Who? Why? Later, I found an article about the Court of Honor, as the median is called. “The Court of Honor is a series of statues, most honoring military figures, that line the median strip in West Wisconsin Avenue between 9th and 10th Streets,” Bobby Tanzilo wrote in On Milwaukee.

“The collection of sculpture became known as the Court of Honor because it was the site of the annual crowning of the Rex (or king) of the Milwaukee Midsummer Carnival Festival, which began in 1898 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Wisconsin’s birth as a state.

“The carnival only endured for four years, but it must have been a fun event, because it drew visitors from across the state… Each year, for the carnival, the association that organized the week-long event would build temporary classical wood and plaster colonnades. Two years in, it commissioned architect Alfred Clas to design a Corinthian column – the Midsummer Carnival Shaft – that would be constructed of Bedford limestone to serve as a permanent centerpiece for the event.”

The Midsummer Carnival Shaft thus stands to this day, silently honoring an event that probably 99.44% of Milwaukeeans could not identify. Just another example of something that can make the urban texture of a city interesting — a forgotten oddity in plain sight.

Paper Purge

Posted on October 8, 2019 by admin

Not long ago, I decided to purge some paper around the house. Specifically, user manuals for machines that are long gone. You’d think that those would have been tossed along with the items themselves, but that’s not how clutter works, unless you’re Marie What’s-Her-Name.

Papers like this.

In the same vein, I had setup instructions for iMacs, a reel mower that now has vines on it, landline phones long junked, defunct cameras, a previous dishwasher, clothes washer, clothes dryer, and oven, and a few odds and ends I don’t even remember owning.

From a bilingual food processor manual, I learned the amusing fact that the French for food processor is robot culinaire.

Also: Woody warnings. We took the actual toy to Boot Hill long ago — well, metaphorical boot hill — after the dog did him bodily harm. Somehow, the pamphlet of written warnings was left behind.

Warnings because the only instructions involve replacing the batteries that power Woody’s voice box. The rest of the text lists warnings about the batteries: keep them away from small children, don’t swallow them yourself, put them in correctly, including the correct polarity, don’t mix different kinds of batteries, or old and new batteries, and don’t let the damn things leak, but if you do, throw them away — in a locally acceptable manner.

Pedestrian stuff. Not a single warning along the lines of: If you see Woody walking and hear him talking, you are not having a psychotic episode. Woody is a sentient creature with a secret life.

Once Upon a Time in Quentin Tarantino’s Childhood

Posted on October 7, 2019 by admin

We went to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood not long ago. Been a while since I’d seen a new movie, or a Quentin Tarantino movie, for that matter. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d ever seen one of his movies in the theater — everything’s been on tape or DVD or demand, to list formats chronologically.

I left Once Upon a Time wondering how old Tarantino is. I knew next to nothing about him, except for his fondness for putting ultraviolence in his movies. From the way he depicted the period of the movie, 1969, I got the sense that he remembered it, but not as an adult. Like me.

Sure enough, he was born in 1963. That makes us contemporaries. Later he must have filled in some of the gaps his own memory might not have retained, as one does. I can’t imagine, for instance, that a six-year-old would have paid much attention to Sharon Tate or any of the movies she was in, least of all a bomb like The Wrecking Crew. (Matt Helm movies are best forgotten.) On the other hand, Tarantino probably saw old TV westerns on reruns or shows like the FBI or Mannix in the early ’70s, just as I did.

Yuriko came away baffled by many of the references. She’d come to see Brad Pitt, whom she enjoyed seeing — he had a good part — but it isn’t a past she shares. Neither of our daughters went, but come to think of it, most of the references probably would have been strange to them as well.

Despite including the Manson family and some other unsavory aspects of the period, the movie was an exercise in nostalgia — of a kid who watched American movies and TV beginning in the late 1960s. For a time when Americans watched roughly the same TV shows and movies, because options were much more limited than they are now.

What will be the basis of pop-culture nostalgia for the 2010s in 50 years, if there’s any? I’d think it would be as fractured as entertainment is now. Well, so what? Can’t say that I care. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Pitt, as stuntman Cliff Booth, had my favorite line in the movie. In a flashback, Booth was on the set of The Green Hornet with Bruce Lee, who is characterized as a preening, vain fellow, and they’re rehearsing a fight scene.

Bruce Lee: My hands are registered as lethal weapons. We get into a fight, I accidentally kill you? I go to jail.

Cliff Booth: Anybody accidentally kills anybody in a fight, they go to jail. It’s called manslaughter.

Greenwood Cemetery ’14

Posted on October 6, 2019 by admin

Has it been five years since I first visited Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn for the first time? So it has. Green-Wood Cemetery remains one of the prettiest I’ve been to, even in drizzly early spring. No doubt the fall colors, as I saw them five years ago, are returning now.

Greenwood Cemetery The main pond was a particularly lovely spot. This is the cemetery’s chapel, a 1911 Warren & Wetmore design; that firm also did Grand Central Terminal, among other things.

This is Peter Brunjes, looking quite 19th century.

A casual search — “Peter Brunjes,” “Peter Brunjes New York,” “Peter Brunjes Green-Wood” — reveals nothing. Looks like he was a respectable citizen, even locally prominent, just to judge by his stone, which is probably the effect his family wanted. Sic transit gloria mundi, dude. Think you will be remembered? You will not. But so what?

The main entrance, dating from the 1860s, seen in a different light than last year.

It’s a design by Richard Upjohn, who’s known for his Gothic churches.

The stone of one George Struthers, died 1849, aged 31 years.

From Our Firemen, The History of the NY Fire Departments [all sic]: The “Harrington Guard” was a volunteer organization from Union Engine Company No. 18, and Henry Wilson was its captain. This volunteer company was in existence for a number of years, and one act while Mr. Wilson was in command should not go unrecorded. We allude to their noble conduct toward the first of the New York Volunteers who died after that regiment returned from the Mexican War.

“The late Sherman Brownell was called upon to deliver the address at the dedication of a monument placed in Greenwood by the Harrington Guard. That gallant fellow George Struthers was one of the first to enroll his name in Company 1 of the first regiment of New York State Volunteers.

“With them he went to Mexico, and remained among them until disbanded. He was one of the comparatively small number of the originals of the regiment that returned, and, although he escaped the ravages of the battlefield and returned to his friends, he was, like most of his companions, prostrated with the climate and exposure.

“He found, by disease contracted in Mexico, that he was fast failing. He went to the hospital, where his friends gave him all the attention that could be paid him. After remaining in the hospital for some time, he was called from his sufferings on earth.”

Two Milwaukee Courthouses of Imposing Size and Grandeur

Posted on October 3, 2019 by admin

Last year during Doors Open Milwaukee, we passed by the Milwaukee County Courthouse. I don’t think it was participating, but anyway we didn’t go in. Naturally, this year it’s still an imposing neo-classical edifice by McKim, Mead, and White, finished in 1931.

The building was open and we went in. But not at the owl entrance, whose single word Justice, if you’re in a cynical mood, might fall under the category of promises, promises.
Some of the courthouse’s arched hallways were well lit.
Others, not so much.
One well-appointed courtroom, that of Judge Someone-or-Other, was open for inspection.
Mostly the halls and courtroom exuded a sense of serious business, which is appropriate. Don’t want any goofballs on the bench. But there was at least one oddity in the otherwise staid atmosphere of the courthouse halls: a weight and horoscope machine. What?
Further to the east on Wisconsin Ave. — there’s that street again — is the Federal Building & U.S. Courthouse for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. They say it’s a grand old edifice, completed in the 1890s to house not only federal courts, but also the main post office and the customs service. I’m sure it must be, but the exterior is a little hard to see in 2019 during restoration.
Some of the granite facade is visible.
A design overseen by Willoughby J. Edbrooke, whose Wiki page tell us: “[He] remained faithful to a Richardsonian Romanesque style into the era of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States.” A man who knew what he liked and stuck with it.

The vaulting atrium impresses mightily, but it’s hard to capture its image with a simple camera. Looking up, the view is through a steel structure which I assume is for support in some way.
These are views from the fourth floor. Originally the atrium roof was open, in the way pre-air conditioning buildings often were.
We saw two courtrooms, including the Ceremonial Courtroom and its exceptional woodwork.
Called “ceremonial” because besides being a workaday federal courtroom, it’s also where new judges and new U.S. citizens tend to be sworn in.

An Eastern Church With Pews, A Western Church Without

Posted on October 2, 2019 by admin

Buildings, including churches, defy expectations at times. Often enough that expectations really shouldn’t be expected, but we do that anyway.

Take St. George Melkite Greek Catholic Church, which we visited on Saturday as part of Doors Open Milwaukee. It was built in 1917.
Though the Melkites are in communion with Rome, I was expecting an Eastern-style church inside. Mostly, it is, with icons and an iconostasis and Christ on the ceiling. But it also includes pews.
One of the congregation was on hand to tell us about the church, and his idea was that the pews were a bit of syncretism on the part of the Lebanese and Syrian founding families of the church, or maybe the architect, one Erhard Brielmaier. Also, the church didn’t have icons in its early days, those being added in more recent decades, which might explain why their language is English.
Christ on the ceiling is a particular admirable work.
I was astonished to learn that it isn’t a painting, which it very much looks like, but a printed image made using a highly sophisticated machine and fixed in place.

Back on Wisconsin Ave. (for St. George is a few blocks to the north), we visited one more church on Saturday: Calvary Presbyterian, a soaring Victorian Gothic structure dating from the early 1870s, designed by architects Koch & Hess.

That was a long time before the highway, unfortunately next to the church, was built.
Nickname: the Big Red Church.
Inside, I was surprised again.
“Not what you expected, is it?” said one of the congregation. He explained that with pews, the church would be used once a week for a few hours — unsustainable for a small membership. Twenty years ago, they decided to remove the pews. When the congregation meets now, it’s on temporary chairs under a multi-petal canopy. Other groups also meet for other purposes in the now-open space, making the place an active one.

The Tripoli Shrine Temple

Posted on October 1, 2019 by admin

Last night at around 11, or just an hour before September ended, I sat on my deck outside in short sleeves, in comfort. Warm winds blew. The day had been summer-like, in the mid-80s at least, and October 1 has been roughly the same. Rain is coming tonight, though, and so are cooler temps.

I don’t have any interest in becoming a Shriner, but I have to like a fraternal organization whose members wear fezzes and meet in gilded, onion-domed buildings inspired by the 19th-century popular vogue for Orientalism. I’ve seen Shriners in their little cars buzzing along parade routes, and once upon a time I went to a Shrine Circus in a temple that the Shriners later sold, and which has been sold again.

In Milwaukee, on Wisconsin Ave., the Shriners built themselves an exceptional edifice, the Tripoli Shrine Temple, taking inspiration from the Taj Mahal.
No example of Moorish Revival is complete without stone camels, I think. Especially considering that the Shriners originally called themselves the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Two camels are perched beside the front entrance steps.

The statue to the right of Shriner and child is a nod to the Shriners Hospitals for Children, of which there are 22 in North America (though none in Milwaukee).
The temple, designed by Clas & Shepard of Milwaukee and completed in 1928, is every bit as ornate inside as out.
Second floor.
Looking up.
There was no shortage of Shriners around, helping show off the place.
This one gave a short talk about the building. He had interesting things to say, especially about the countless thousands of tiles on the floors and wall. Literally countless, since no one kept count or has made a count. He said that during the interior construction of the temple in the late ’20s, a family of four skilled in tilework lived in the temple, staying until they were done a few years later.