Larry and I just got back from visiting Ellen
in Berlin. It was a great trip, but
before I write about that, I want to finish my musings about Wisconsin.
While Amy was canoeing in Wisconsin, I stayed at
an AirBnB above the West Allis Cheese and Sausage Shop. Wisconsinites fricking LOVE cheese.
As every Wisconsinite I have ever met has told
me, Wisconsin is second only to California in cheese production. And as I have told all of them, California
doesn’t know or care, so Wisconsin may as well just own it and claim the number
one spot.
The West Allis Cheese and Sausage shop also
carried a wide variety of tasty Wisconsin beer and some very bad Wisconsin
wine. I think Wisconsin can have cheese,
and California will continue to revel in its number one spot in wine.
All of my Wisconsin travel guides (I am a freak
for travel books) mentioned that while in Milwaukee, the traveler should visit
the Milwaukee Public Museum. So I did.
How to describe it? The original museum was founded in 1851. There
were less than 30,000 people in the pretty rough frontier town of Milwaukee,
and a few guys found time to form a natural history museum. They opened it to the public in 1882, the
collection has continued to grow, and now it is enormous.
The MPM’s biggest claim to fame: in 1890, Carl
Akeley, a taxidermist and biologist, created the first museum habitat diorama
in the world, depicting a muskrat colony.
I haven’t been able to find an exact count of
how many dioramas are currently in the MPM, but there are at least sixty, depicting
all corners of the globe and all eras, crammed with molting taxidermied animals
and plaster casts of natives in ethnic garb.
There is also an enormous plastic glacier, a two-story
Costa Rican rainforest room with a waterfall, and a room full of live
butterflies.
But by far, the favorite exhibit of Milwaukeeans
is The Streets of Old Milwaukee. Opened
in 1965, it is a full-sized recreation of Milwaukee streets from the early
1900s. It is supposed to be early
evening, so the streets are dark and all the houses and stores are lit from within,
showing a variety of businesses, homes, people, pets, furniture, etc.
I wandered through the darkened streets with
other visitors, many of whom were children, as it was a rainy summer day. There was a large crowd gathered at the corner
candy store. As I got closer, I could hear
a buzz of chatter and feel the excitement in the air. That’s when I realized: THE CANDY STORE WAS REAL.
This was pure genius on the part of whoever designed
the exhibit. Four at a time, children
were allowed to enter the tiny shop and buy ten-cent sticks of candy from a
real clerk in an old-timey costume. No
wonder Milwaukeeans let out a collective howl of protest whenever anyone suggests
doing away with The Streets of Old Milwaukee.
There is a great online article about the MPM:
I did, in fact, find the rattlesnake button,
and now I feel like a member of a really cool Milwaukee club. I just need to make it to a Brewers game now…
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