The Lakefront in the Off-Season: Milwaukee's Skyline Learns to Brood
Veterans Park empties, the marina hauls its last boats, and the downtown skyline across the lagoon becomes the city's best free painting. A November appreciation of Milwaukee's front window.
Every Milwaukeean has stood in Veterans Park and done the same thing: looked across the lagoon at the skyline and thought, whatever the city's troubles, that it photographs like a major American city — because it is one. The lakefront is Milwaukee's front window, a necklace of parks assembled by visionaries a century ago on the Olmsted principle that the water belongs to everyone, and November is when the window is washed clean and left to the locals.
The skyline in the frame keeps its side of the bargain: the U.S. Bank Center's white grid, the Northwestern Mutual towers' glass exclamation points, the Couture and the new residential high-rises thickening the middle, and the Art Museum's wings on the pier doing their noon gesture for an audience of gulls. Behind the postcard is the working lakefront's winter calendar — the marina's haul-outs, the ice rink at Red Arrow, the kite store waiting for the lake wind to become an asset again, and the first ice forming in the lagoon's shallows while the open lake steams on cold mornings.
The parks' designers left the city an instruction in landscape form: the lakefront was reserved for the public in perpetuity, and every generation's attempt to chip at it has re-taught the lesson. What survives is rare among American cities — miles of prime waterfront held in common, free at the point of use, in all seasons.
Summer sells the lakefront. November tells the truth about it: beautiful without trying, cold without apology, and still — a hundred years after the planners insisted — everybody's.
