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.

Walworth County Tin Man

Posted on September 3, 2025 by admin

It may be September, but it’s still warm. Time to take advantage of the second shoulder season of the year in my own slightly demented way. Back to posting around September 28.

Last month I’d gotten a tip from one of the usual sources detailing roadside oddities, so there I was, tooling down a road in rural Walworth County, Wisconsin. The sun was hot and the corn was high. My tip was solid. I pulled off the road and walked a little ways for a good look at the oddity. It is larger than most.

It’s called “Tin Man,” according to published sources, rising 45 feet and weighing in at 20 tons. The creators were two local men entertaining themselves. Looks are free from the road. If that’s not an authentic roadside attraction, I don’t know what is. I was careful to stay off the property, however.

“That statue stands tall in Robert Stewart’s home near Lake Geneva. In fact, it can be seen from about a mile away. It took him and his friend Shane Pope two years to make it,” WTMJ-TV reported in early 2021.

“The statue was built primarily out of scrap metal that Robert was able to collect, which includes the legs, the arms, and body of the statue. The torso is an old water tank that was used in the Pabst Brewery. However, the most iconic piece of the statue might be its Officer Big Mac head.” (I can add that its legs are hay conveyors.)

I’d taken the head for Mayor McCheese – that would make sense in Wisconsin – but actually it’s the lesser-known Officer Big Mac, whom I suppose worked for McCheese until a falling out in the 1980s. Or actually did he answer to Ronald McDonald? Though Ronald had no official title, it was clear he was calling the shots in McDonaldland. Anyway, there the officer is, atop a scrap-metal creation.

Tin Man had been visible from a distance. That raised arm looks a little — odd. Let’s just say he’s waving at the occasional passersby on the road.

When I say rural, I mean rural.

Closer to Lake Geneva, in fact in Fontana, Wisconsin, is the Fontana Frog. I saw it the same warm summer day as the Tin Man.

Part of the long defunct Frog Hollow miniature golf course, according to Roadside America. Looks the part.

Not to be confused with another model frog to be seen in Fontana. Two giant frogs in one town. The world’s a peculiar place.

Two Southern Wisconsin Cemeteries

Posted on September 2, 2025 by admin

Something I’d never seen on a gravestone: a truck. I’ll bet most people can say that.

My best guess when I saw it was that Kenneth C. Remer was a trucking man who, among other things, lived through the short romanticization of trucking men in the mid-1970s. Something I’m sure is lost on later generations, as if that matters. If I were silly enough to say “That’s a big 10-4” to either of my daughters, I wouldn’t expect comprehension. That bit of code wasn’t invented by truckers, but even so.

I looked him up, as one can in our time. His obit says he was a “partner in Remer Milk Service.” So could be he drove a milk truck, at least sometimes. That is a liquid-hauling truck depicted on the stone. Not something celebrated in song and story, but useful work all the same.

Further down the rabbit hole, I came across this: “The 1970s Trucking Craze Can Be Traced Back to a Regional TV Commercial for Bread.” I never knew that, or if I did, I forgot it in the 50 years since then, because I’ve devoted very little thought to the subject over that time. Just another thing invented by ad men.

Another thought on that: though “Convoy” was much more popular, C.W. McCall’s “Wolf Creek Pass” is by far the more entertaining song. (And it’s a real place.) A better song about driving a truck is “Willin’,” originally by Little Feat. Of all people, the inestimable Linda Ronstadt did a remarkable cover of it.

I encountered Mr. and Mrs. Remer at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Burlington, Wisconsin last month. A Catholic cemetery with a nice assortment of stones.

Unusual: two Air Force (I assume originally Army Air Corps) Master Sergeants, married to each other.

During my recent visit to Elkhorn, Wisconsin, I did no more than look for an “historic cemetery” on Google Maps to find Hazel Ridge Cemetery. Historic for sure, founded more than 150 years ago.

It too has a fine collection of memorials. The cemetery is also an arboretum, with more than 25 native species and ornamental varieties.

Hazel Ridge has a clutch of war dead memorials, including an 8-inch siege Howitzer as the centerpiece of a Grand Army of Republic memorial.

This particular cannon, according to a nearby sign, was made in 1862 at the Fort Pitt Foundry in Pittsburgh. I assume it did its part for the Union. Nearby are soldiers who did likewise.

And those who died in later wars.

The single word “Carpetbagger” on the stone tells quite a story. Operation Carpetbagger involved black-painted B-24s flying low and slow by night, dropping supplies and agents to the resistance in France before and after the Normandy invasion. Clearly dangerous work. RIP, Bud.

Elkhorn, Wisconsin

Posted on August 28, 2025 by admin

Labor Day weekend again? How does summer vanish so quickly? Back to posting on September 2.

Once upon a time, one of the many First National Banks of the world stood in downtown Elkhorn, Wisconsin, complete with a sturdy bank interior common at the time. As seen in a postcard from the early 20th century.

Go looking for the bank these days, and this is what you find.

Once a bank, now a pocket park. The view from the inside, looking back at the facade.

There were no signs to indicate how the park came to be. A less imaginative act would simply have been to raze the old building in its entirety and leave a weedy gap in the downtown streetscape, hoping for redevelopment that might never come.

Inside the park is a sundial, dedicated to the memory of one Eidola Renner (d. 1983) of the Elkhorn Garden Club. Ah, garden clubs. The term makes me think of Khigh Dhiegh.

This must be her. The sundial – whose gnomon is missing, so it can’t function for telling time – has been there since 1987, so I assume the park has been there at least that long, if not longer.

I arrived in Elkhorn on a warm day in early August, traveling by myself in southeastern Wisconsin. It wasn’t too hot for a stroll around the town’s municipal square, home to a “government center,” a mid-century box, but not the storied old courthouse that should be there.

There was a tank. How many tanks are loose in Wisconsin?

Well-tended buildings near the square.

Every town has one of these, it seems.

What is that?

Public notice of an antique alarm system, that’s what.

Not the first one I’ve seen. This one was made by the O.B. McClintock Co. of Minneapolis. “In 1901 O.B. McClintock came to Minneapolis and founded the American Bank Protection Company, which produced burglar alarm systems,” explains a site called Lavilo. “After his resignation in 1908, he opened the O.B. McClintock Company to ‘manufacture electrical chime and clock systems,’ which he sold to financial institutions all across the United States.”

Banks began telling the public the time quite a while ago (McClintock surely wasn’t the first). I’m of course old enough to remember dialing time and temperature, though I can’t remember which financial institution sponsored the service in ’70s San Antonio.

Elkhorn has a fine selection of downtown churches as well. Such as the First Congregational United Church of Christ.

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church.

St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Church.

Founded in 1841, back in Wisconsin Territory days, so “wilderness” was probably apt at the time.

Kenosha Walkabout, Featuring Franks’ Diner & Simmons Memorial Library

Posted on August 27, 2025 by admin

Always good to see their beaming faces.

The poster is on a window at Franks’ Diner, formerly an exterior window, but with an expansion of the diner many years ago, now facing the added section, where Ann and I had lunch on a late July Friday. Kenosha, home of Franks’, was another stop in our recent rambles around southeastern Wisconsin.

Finding Franks’ Diner was no serendipity. We’d been there, back in 2012. The Stooges, back in 1946. I’ll bet they were playing the nearby Kenosha Theater, which is still standing, but in need of restoration.

Not only is the 99-year-old Franks’ still there, it’s still dishing up dandy diner fare at popular prices. Back then, I wrote:

The place had that diner smell: eggs and meats and hash browns and coffee. It also had that diner sound: the murmur of conversation, workers calling to each other, silverware scraping plates, metal clinking metal, the hiss of the griddle.

It was packed. A row of people sat at the counter, while others were at booths in the small room added to the counter room. A line of people waited for their seats in a long row behind the people at the counter.

That’s exactly the same as our July visit, except that people waited outside, since it was summer instead of winter and (of course) prices were higher. Once seated, I had the Garbage Plate. I’d skipped it last time, and I wasn’t about to miss it this time around.

2012: The star of the show is its Garbage Plate, a concoction of hash-brown potatoes, eggs, green peppers, onions, jalapeños (if you want them), and a choice of three or fewer meats (or including no meat). The thing is seriously large. The standard Garbage Plate has five eggs.

The restaurant also supplies some reading material.

After lunch, we went a few blocks away and parked the car in the shade of large trees in Library Park. Ann waited in the car with the windows down – it was very warm, but not too warm for a few minutes of that – while I wandered around the immediate area, including a couple of streets of storefront retail in vintage structures.

Houses across the street from where we parked.

The nearby St. Matthews Episcopal Church.

The inevitable welcome mural. The 1970 Gremlin is an unusual touch. But they were made in Kenosha, so not that unusual.

At the edge of the park, a seated Lincoln. Sculptor Charles Niehaus (d. 1935) did the work. Just one of many that he did all over the place. The president has been sitting there since 1909, centennial of his birth, with restoration work done in more recent decades.

Nearby in the park, Kenosha’s Civil War memorial, called “Winged Victory” on electronic maps, a name that gets right to the point.

It’s Library Park because of the Gilbert M. Simmons Memorial Library, a branch of the Kenosha Public Library system, dominating its side of the park. It has a little more heft than most municipal branch libraries.

When it opened in 1900, the building formed Kenosha’s main library. Daniel Burnham designed it.

The Civil War veterans have their memorial outside. Great War vets are honored inside the library.

We’d happened on the Library Park Historic District, surrounding Library Park. The park itself goes back to the early years of Kenosha, when the land was a New England–style town commons. Forty-two properties, built from 1843 to 1930, form the district. A diner and an historic district: just the thing for a warm summer day stroll.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: Wisconsin