The Cathedral of Chrome: Harley-Davidson's Museum Keeps the Faith
Built a century ago in a Milwaukee backyard shed, the Motor Company put its archive in a museum on the Menomonee in 2008 — a river of motorcycles from Serial Number One to the present, in the city that invented them.
Every pilgrimage has a geography, and Harley-Davidson's is a six-acre campus on the Menomonee River where the faithful come to walk a line of motorcycles that starts with the oldest known Harley in existence — Serial Number One, from 1903, resting in a glass case like a saint's relic — and runs, bike by bike, through a century of American mechanical desire.
The Harley-Davidson Museum, opened in 2008 for the company's 105th anniversary, is built from the archive of a firm founded by William Harley and the Davidson brothers in a ten-by-fifteen-foot shed in Milwaukee in 1903. The exhibits do the history straight: the Knuckleheads and Panheads, the racing bikes, the wartime machines, Elvis's 1956 KH, the wall of tanks in their hundreds of liveries, and the design lab's worth of prototypes that never shipped. It is industrial history told by the industry's most mythological survivor — the great American motorcycle company that outlived a hundred rivals in its own hometown's ecosystem of builders.
The museum doubles as the city's rally hall: the anniversary parties that bring a hundred thousand riders to Milwaukee every five years run through its grounds, and its restaurant and events lawn keep a working calendar through the riding season's end.
November quiets the campus to the historians and the hardcore — the last riders of the year rolling in ahead of the salt, the archive's light falling on Serial Number One. Milwaukee builds things. This is the museum of the thing it built loudest.
