AGSL Once More

Posted on October 4, 2026 by admin

I’m glad to report that more people seemed to be visiting the American Geographical Society Library this year (Saturday before last) than during our previous visits, in 2018 and 2023, when it was also open for the Doors Open Milwaukee event. The library is in the Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

I didn’t take too many pictures of other visitors, but here is one.

Mostly, I took pics of globes.

Globes, globes, globes.

The other day I discovered a place in Salt Lake City called Dolcetti Gelato that seems to include a lot of globes in its décor. This is a design we can all applaud. Hope the gelato is good. Even coming close to Florentine gelato would be a pretty tall order, though.

An oddity among the globes.

A nearby sign tells us:

Dymaxion map globe structure. This globe was one of 100 produced by Levi Strauss & Co. as a promotional artifact. Inscription on the globe: This is a Dymaxion globe designed by Buckminster Fuller, best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. The word Dymaxion and the Fuller projection Dymaxion map design are trademarks of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, 2040 Alameda Padre Sierra, Suite 224, Santa Barbara, California 93103. Copyright 1938, 1967 and 1992. All rights reserved.

By golly, it occurs to me that I’ve accidentally done more Bucky tourism than most people, probably, including a walk by the geodesic dome house in Carbondale, Illinois, and a look at the only existing Dymaxion vehicle, which happens to be in Reno, Nevada. I live a charmed life, clearly. But dang, I missed his grave this year at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts.

I expect the library has a lot more maps than globes – they take up less space – and a fair number were on display for the event. Including some non-geographic maps, such as one using song titles for place names. A detail.

Details from a map called Isle of Pleasure, all of whose place names relate to alcohol. A late Prohibition-era publication. The main entity is called State of Inebriation.

An entire table was given over to Latin America.

This kind of thing gets me all itchy. I checked, and for an investment of $1,200 or so (round trip) and at least 14 hours each way, one can buzz down to Buenos Aires from Chicago. Alas, not today. And yet – the establishing shots for the series Envidiosa on Netflix, which I have been unaccountably watching for a while now (once a month or so) — are quite the advertisement for the Argentine capital.

Bee Boun in Silver City

Posted on October 1, 2026 by admin

Rain to end September and begin October. Generally not heavy, just persistent for two days. As if on cue for the first of the month, a handful of trees here and there suddenly displayed streaks of yellow. Every day there will be more of that, until there isn’t any.

After visiting a run of Milwaukee churches last Saturday morning under a warm early fall sky, we were inspired to find a Laotian restaurant. The place, Vientiane Noodle Shop, calls itself Laotian-Thai on its menu, probably because everyone knows about Thailand, while far fewer about Laos, such being the dismal state of geographic knowledge. A lot of the menu was also Thai, but it included Laotian specialties. Such as this.

Bee Boun. Also transliterated Bie Boun, apparently, but anyway a rice vermicelli-based dish that’s majorly delicious.

It was good to support the restaurant in general, but also because there is major construction on its street, National Avenue, that might be interfering with its trade volume.

Naturally we’d parked on a side street (Shea Avenue) and walked to Vientiane Noodle Shop. At the intersection of National and Shea – which meet at a 45-degree angle – is a triangular pocket park featuring plantings and a bench, along with some artwork fixed in the ground, dated 2007, and seeming to reflect the neighborhood population during its history through “welcome to our community” in various languages, if the German is any indication.

The neighborhood is known as Silver City. As many times as I’ve visited Milwaukee, that was a new one to me. It’s largely Hispanic these days, with Hmong and other groups also living there, and seems to have followed a common evolution in that regard, beginning with various European ethnic groups more than 150 years ago giving way to other groups as the decades passed.

Why Silver City? A site called Neighborhoods in Milwaukee (and others) offers an explanation. Sounds like folk etymology to me, but never mind:

Silver City got its name in the mid-1890s when area laborers working in the developing Menomonee Valley factories were paid in silver coin. When the workers circulated the silver among the area’s 24 taverns, the name “Silver City” began to appear in Milwaukee newspapers.

Silver was circulated everywhere in the 1890s, so that doesn’t really cut it. Old newspapers using the name might hint at a nickname for the area created by anonymous newspapermen for some lost reason – who can say? That kind of uncertainty adds interest to a neighborhood, if you ask me.

St. Vincent de Paul Parish & Ascension Lutheran Church, Milwaukee

Posted on September 30, 2026 by admin

The church participants in Doors Open Milwaukee typically provided visitors written descriptions of the church and the church’s history, on actual sheets of paper. Good for them, in this over-digital age. I picked them up for future reference – as in, right now – and the one for St. Vincent de Paul Parish was rather long on the various priests associated with the parish (and two Congressmen who went to church there), with less about the church building, though it does say that the current one was completed in 1900 in a Renaissance Revival style by architect Bernard Kolpacki (d. 1900, so this was probably his last project among a number in Milwaukee).

This church, too, was originally for a Polish congregation.

The sheet offers information about Rev. Wincenty Lewandowski (d. 1900), who founded St. Vincent de Paul Parish. He had felt it expedient to leave the German Empire in the 1870s due to Kulturkampf and all that jazz, making his way to Ohio at first. When he got there, he got to work. The sheet notes the following glimpse of something that could use a little more detail:

Bishop Richard Gilmore sent him to Toledo, Ohio, where he would found St. Hedwig Parish in October 1875, and St. Anthony Parish in 1882. For reasons unclear in the surviving records, many were opposed to Lewandowski at Saint Hedwig, his multiple reassignment requests to the bishop were denied, and the situation devolved in June 1885 into a bomb being discovered under the rectory and a riot breaking out between parishioners. Lewandowski resigned and departed for Milwaukee.

Other sources mention the 1885 church riot in Toledo, and the fact that St. Hedwig in that city was torched the next year. Religious-inspired violence is one thing, but church riots are considerably rarer on these shores. Yet Toledo isn’t the only one I’ve encountered while visiting churches – there’s also the story of the former Cathedral of All Saints of the Polish National Catholic Church in Chicago, which not only involved an ecclesiastical riot, but schism thrown in mix for that extra volatility.

Impressive stained glass.

For the items below, I had my AI program remove the glare. This is one of the genuinely useful things that it can do, but I have to be careful to tell it not to change anything else in the image, because it has a tendency to “improve” things. Sometimes it does so even if I tell it not to, but for these two, nothing was changed.

Next door. Probably the rectory. An ivy-covered rectory.

The last church of the day was Ascension Lutheran Church.

Services in English and Spanish, as you’d except. And that third one? Hmong, it turns out.

On the door.

I don’t know that DHS goons would specifically be looking for Hmong – which would be an act of base ingratitude, among other things. Probably just the usual brown folk. Raiding churches: what a good way to win hearts and minds.

Ascension Lutheran dates back to the 1850s, in this case founded by Norwegians. The current sanctuary dates from 1923.

The church sports a number of memorials, as churches often do, but this pair was a little unusual.

Good to see a presidential site, however minor. United Spanish War Veterans: not an organization one hears much about anymore, but it lasted until 1998, a few years after the last veteran member passed, namely Nathan Cook, U.S. Navy, who died in 1992 at 106. A successor org, Sons of Spanish American War Veterans, is still around.

St. Anthony Parish & St. Hyacinth Parish, Milwaukee

Posted on September 29, 2026 by admin

Rain coming tonight, then a cooling trend, as they say in the weather biz. For me, that meant lingering on the deck in the upper 60s F. early this evening, while I can, eating dinner outside, drinking tea. In the background, blending with the sound of crickets, were the pleasant sounds of a youth-league baseball game, which also happened to be visible in the park behind my back yard. All sensations that will disappear with oncoming fall.

On Saturday, a nice warm early fall day, we first made our way to St. Anthony Parish in Milwaukee as part of the Doors Open event. Once upon a time, a German congregation.

Wonder how many buildings are still around whose development was delayed by the Panic of 1873? There must be some. St. Anthony at least is one, not being consecrated until 1882, and even then the interior wasn’t completed until around the end of that decade.

The Germans built something suitably German, a Gothic Revival Hallenkirche, whose nave and side aisle ceilings are roughly the same height.

The last mass in German must have been sometime. These days, one Sunday mass is in English and two are in Spanish.

Not far away at all is St. Hyacinth Parish.

In this case, a legacy of a Polish congregation, an Italian Renaissance style done in Milwaukee’s Cream City brick, and another development of the 1880s.

Henry Messmer [d. 1899], a Swiss immigrant, did the design.

These days, three masses are in Spanish, one in English, none in Polish. Time flies, neighborhoods change.

St. Joseph Chapel, Milwaukee

Posted on September 28, 2026 by admin

For a mid-sized city, Milwaukee has a remarkable number of historic churches. Every late 19th- and early 20th-century ethnic group of any size supported a number of churches, in the case of Catholics and Protestants both. Germans, for instance, built both Catholic and Lutheran edifices in quantity, as did Poles, without that Lutheran component. Many of their Catholic parishes are now majority Hispanic, and it these that we largely focused on during our visit to Milwaukee.

We managed to visit five such churches on Saturday during the most recent Doors Open Milwaukee.

As fine as all of these churches were, one stood out: the recently restored St. Joseph Chapel, a Romanesque Revival structure on the grounds of St. Joseph Center, a convent that’s the international motherhouse of the School Sisters of St. Francis, which was founded in the 1890s. The chapel is tucked away in the convent complex, which itself is tucked away in a Milwaukee neighborhood.

All those churches built ca. 100 years ago or more needed to be designed, and in the case of St. Joseph Chapel, the sisters tasked Peter Brust and Richard Philipp, two of the busiest architects in Milwaukee at the time, to do the job. And what a job they did.

Of course, any building of this kind is more than the work of talented architects. Unnamed artisans in Austria contributed the mosaics on the walls, such as Christ Giving Peter the Keys, which is behind the altar, or the Parable of the Ten Virgins, one of the side mosaics. My photos do them little justice to their intricacies and especially the artful use of the color gold for flourishes that enliven the images. I haven’t seen mosaics of this caliber since the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, though these aren’t neo-Byzantine.

The floor mosaics are also worth a good look.

Behind the main altar is the Chapel of Perpetual Adoration. A chapel within a chapel, I suppose. It is every bit as sumptuous as the nave.

Depicted under the angels surrounding the monstrance are notable Franciscans, I understand, including Sts. Francis and Clare kneeling. Yuriko asked about the fellow in red, and it took a while to work it out, but that seems to be St. Bonaventure, who was a cardinal too, and a writer of considerable energy, which might account for the book in his hand.

Return to Mars

Posted on September 27, 2026 by admin

I’ve now been to Mars Cheese Castle about n times. I pass its way often, and while I don’t always stop there, visits over 40 years have added up to n. Like Wisconsin itself, or Milwaukee, or a healthy number of other places.

After much of a day in Milwaukee, for the latest Doors Open Milwaukee event, we stopped at Mars, mere miles north of the Wisconsin-Illinois line on I-94. First thing, I decided to document the sticker situation at the base of the highway sign.

I don’t see you-know-who from a much larger chain of retail establishments whose mascot is known to dam streams and sue alleged lookalikes. There are no locations yet in Wisconsin, but he is waiting, biding his time.

At 80 feet, the sign is a story unto itself, with the Wisconsin legislature specially allowing the store to keep it when the whole complex had to be moved in 2011 to accommodate the expansion of the highway. By that time, 80 feet was too tall for a modern roadside sign, but Mars was grandfathered in. Could be that Wisconsin respects its ’50s roadside heritage.

Inside, the mouse is still around. I don’t know that he has a name. Maybe Mario Mouse, after the original owner of Mars Cheese Castle, one Mario Ventura Sr., a gas station owner who pivoted into cheese in 1957 after his gas station burned down. Pivoting into cheese is a thing you can do in Wisconsin. Eat Cheese or Die.

Tom recently sent me by email — out of the blue, coincidence or synchronicity? — a picture of us with the mouse from our ’22 trip around Lake Michigan. A favorite photo of us, he explained, and it is a good one.

Of course, I’d been there before, such as in ’15. The mouse seems to have moved since then.

Cheese hats and other extruded yellow shapes are for sale, along with edible cheese, sausage and other meat, candy, beer and many other comestibles, plus knickknacks, gimcracks and gewgaws galore.

Mars apparently has its own line of wine.

Lore associates mice with cheese – who’ll eat pretty much anything in your pantry – so why not wine? Another version of the mascot could be sprawled nearby, a wine bottle in his hand.

Back to the AGSL

Posted on September 28, 2023 by admin

The Plymouth Church wasn’t actually the last place I visited for Doors Open, it was the last place I planned to visit. But the event still had an hour to run when I walked out of that church on Saturday, so I checked the map and discovered I was within walking distance of the American Geographical Society Library on the UW-Milwaukee campus, which is usually open only Monday to Friday.

Home to 2 million or so items: maps, atlases, photographs, monographs, serials, digital geospatial data and of course globes. Many, many globes.

A divers collection.

Maps on display.

This wasn’t my first visit, though it had been about five years, and I hope not my last. Maps are useful, but also their own reward.

Plymouth Church, Milwaukee

Posted on September 27, 2023 by admin

Tucked away on a side street northeast of downtown Milwaukee, and not far from Lake Michigan to the east and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to the west, is Plymouth Church. I arrived there on Saturday afternoon as the last place on my Doors Open visit.

It is United Church of Christ, one of whose confessional predecessors were New England Congregationalists. Puritans and Separatists, if you go back far enough.

“Alexander Eschweiler, who designed many prominent houses and buildings throughout Milwaukee, served as the architect of the original building,” notes Historic Milwaukee. “His design harkened back to an older pastoral age, replicating the image of an old English church. The beautiful sanctuary is notable for its nine Tiffany windows.”

Maybe eight. A volunteer at the church entrance – a little old church lady (really) – told me that one of the windows was unsigned. It sure enough looks like a Tiffany, but without the lettering, you can only be 99.44% or some other high percentage sure of its pedigree.

I spent a good while looking at the windows, dedicated more than a century ago to a number of early congregants.

Long looks are highly recommended.

Toward the front entrance. At that moment, the afternoon sun obscured the church’s rose window, which rises over the choir balcony.

Obscured unless you got up close. Then it is a thing of wonder.

The window was installed in 1917. Let Bobby Tanzilo, writing in OnMilwaukee, take it from here: “ ‘The window, a large Tiffany art glass, was presented to the church by Mrs. C. W. Noyes in honor of her mother, Marcia Wells, wife of Daniel Wells, who built the Wells Building and for whom Wells Street was named,’ wrote the Sentinel in June 1917.

“The window represents an angel figure bestowing the benediction of peace. This is the seventh memorial window in Plymouth Church.”

1917. How many of the congregation prayed ardently for Peace that upheaval year? For the American men headed for war? For Victory? All in a single breath?

Tanzilo also discusses the artist who did the rose window, and quite possibly the other windows, while working for Tiffany: Clara Burd (d. 1933). That despite the fact that Tiffany didn’t name the artists that worked on its projects.

“Clara Burd was – along with others including Agnes Northrop who designed the 1917 Hartwell Memorial Window that’s at Art Institute of Chicago, Clara Driscoll and others – one of the so-called ‘Tiffany Girls,’ talented women responsible for designing stunning works of art in glass (not only windows, but also lamps and other objects),” Tanzilo wrote.

She did a lot else besides. Such as book illustrations. “The Returning Prodigal” (1911).

The full article is worth a read, and has a full set of pictures of the windows of the church.

Calvary Cemetery, Milwaukee

Posted on September 26, 2023 by admin

Head west on Bluemound Road in Milwaukee – once an Indian trace, later an early paved road – and before long you arrive at Calvary Cemetery. The entrance is easy to spot, though my shot is from inside.

It’s Milwaukee’s oldest Catholic cemetery, counting as a rural cemetery, as it was outside the young city in the 1850s. About 80,000 people repose there these days, including the first mayor of Milwaukee, Solomon Juneau.

I didn’t see his grave. But there were a lot of others, varying in style, age, condition and carved sentiment. The ground has contour and the trees are mature. Everything you need for a picturesque cemetery.

Including some sizable art and a handful of mausoleums.

That’s the stone of the Jung family, early Milwaukee brewers. What was it Jung said about beer being the royal road to the unconscious? No, that was that other Milwaukee brewer, Ziggy Freud. I believe they were rivals.

A good number of priests are buried at Calvary, including some fairly recent internments, such as this long row of Jesuits.

More Jesuits. A wall of Jesuits, with room for a few more.

The cemetery was unusually busy for a cemetery, because it was on the Doors Open Milwaukee list. Not for the grounds or stones, but for the chapel atop the fittingly named Chapel Hill.

“This cream brick Romanesque style chapel was designed by architect Erhard Brielmaier and built in 1899,” says Historic Milwaukee. “A noted designer of Catholic churches around the country, Brielmaier also designed the famous St. Josaphat on the city’s south side, under construction at the same time. The chapel is located on one of the highest elevations in the city with impressive views of Story Hill, Miller Park and the downtown skyline.”

A nonprofit, the Friends of Calvary Cemetery, is overseeing the long and expensive restoration of the chapel. Some decades ago, the Archdiocese had planned to tear it down, but fortunately preservationists prevailed. Members of the Friends showed visitors around the inside on Saturday. We had to sign a waver in case a piece of it fell on us.

The crypt was dark and crypt-like.

“Originally built intended for services, prayers, private contemplation, and as a mausoleum for clergy, only one clergy member was ever buried at the site,” Historic Milwaukee continues. “The structure has two levels: the upper level features the chapel, with its raised sanctuary and high altar, side altars recessed in twin apses, lofty vaulted ceilings, soaring arches and central dome; the lower level is the bi-level mausoleum containing 45 crypts. Reposing directly beneath the main altar is the body of Reverend Idziego Tarasiewicza, interred in 1903.”

Why just him? The authoritative answer seems to be, dunno. Go figure.

Hope Lutheran Church & The Carpenter Mansion

Posted on September 25, 2023 by admin

I went on Saturday to see a church, Hope Lutheran, west of downtown Milwaukee, but I also got a good look at its attached building, the Carpenter Mansion. It’s an unusual Siamese twin-like pairing of structures.

The Carpenter House came first, built in the 1890s as a home for the founder of a thriving commercial bakery and his large family. These days, it’s a little long in the tooth, though a nonprofit is overseeing its restoration, a slow process. Still, handsome cream city brick, artfully put together.

“The gorgeous cream city brick Queen Anne house is a stunner outside even now, with its broad arches squaring off the entry porch – which also has some striking, stumpy and bulbous Romanesque columns – the elegant chimney, the decorative carved panels – including one under another arch, this one a second-story window – and the remains of a turret on the southeast corner of the home, which is perched atop a small hill,” writes Bobby Tanzilo in On Milwaukee.

The newer Hope Lutheran has its charms, too, such as a well-kept exterior.

The church ceiling evokes the ribs of an upside-down boat, like an impromptu meeting place for members of the early church. In that, and its elegant and simple lines, Hope Lutheran reminded me of St. Paul’s Episcopal in San Antonio, though the structure is even more pronounced in the Texas church.

Also like St. Paul’s, a fine array of stained glass windows.

How often is the Serpent seen in this medium? Not sure how often. Note the nick in the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The church and the house are connected via a small room. The church bought the house long ago, and most of the first floor is church offices. The upper floors are closed for the ongoing restoration.

I took an interest in the fireplaces.

Artful in their way as the stained glass.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Doors Open Milwaukee