Doors Open Milwaukee

For Doors Open Milwaukee I decided to go to the Pabst Brewery with fellow classmate, Lisa Press. I react very similar to her post, as in that it wasn't all that open. First off it wasn't well directed on where were suppose to go and lots of people were just poking around in the gift shop until we asked where we should go. We finally found the "open" part which was basically part of the brewery that they remodeling into a new restaurant. There was a few rooms open to snoop around in, one in particular was a room set up like an office. I really doubt that this office was actually being used at the time because of the renovations. I did take a picture of the desk because there was a photograph of a man that actually was talking in the other room. So it was interesting that maybe this guy usually isn't around talking about the Pabst Brewery, but he was on that Sunday.

Doors Open Milwaukee

During Doors Open Milwaukee, I decided to visit the US Bank observation deck and Marquette's St. Joan of Arc Chapel. At the US Bank building, my main interest was to look at my apartment from the top. The top middle picture shows my building from the top of the observation deck. Every night the US Bank Building obstructs my view of the horizon from my apartment. I wanted to switch the viewpoint by seeing how my own building measured up to the US Bank's perspective.

Afterwards, I took the bus to the St. Joan of Arc Chapel at Marquette. I heard that this was a place where you could experience a holy stone of some sort, so I was pretty interested in checking out. Legend has it that St. Joan of Arc supposedly prayed on this stone and kissed it, and ever since it has been a few degrees colder than the stones around it. The stone in question is featured first in the bottom row of pictures, and it is the flat bottom of the little cubby in the wall. I was encouraged to feel the two "stones" on either side of it before feeling the St. Joan of Arc Stone. The stone did feel a little colder, but perhaps it could have been subconsciously projected...

Doors Open Milwaukee

I chose to visit the Grain Exchange on Michigan St for Doors Open Milwaukee. I have always been intrigued by these two buildings on Michigan St because they are so decorative and ornamental compared to most of the buildings around them. I had heard of the Grain Exchange, but I didn't really know a thing about it. I was surprised to find a large, equally ornamental and decorative room. The tour guide told our group about some of the history of the room, that the grain exchange was sort of like a stock market, but with actual grain. It was interesting to me to see the agricultural aspect of Milwaukee and Wisconsin in such an urban setting. I'm extremely glad I had the opportunity to be inside such a beautiful room with such an important history.

View From the Top

For Doors Open MKE I visited the U.S. Bank building. Although I had been to the bank building many times before I had never gone quite as high. After a 15min wait I finally got to the observation deck. Since Sunday wasnt a very nice day my view was pretty grey but still very visible. Living in Milwaukee makes it seem very small but looking at the city as a whole totally changed my perspective. It was an experience I am glad I got to take part in.

Doors Open Milwaukee

For the Doors Open Milwaukee event this past weekend, I decided to go National Ace Hardware seeing that I needed to pick up a few things for other classes. I also stopped by the Blue Dress Park just above the Holton Street footbridge we visited earlier this semester for class. As I consider my time spent at these two places, I suppose I was intrigued to visit these two because of their seemingly normal or accessible locations. Leaving me to wonder why they were included in Doors Open Milwaukee. Most of the sites listed were places that you would normally either have to pay or wouldn't be allowed everyday access, yet National Ace Hardware and the Blue Dress Park are both very public and open nearly everyday. So I ventured out to find something unique within these very common,often marginalized spaces in downtown Milwaukee. Yet when I arrived at these places, I didn't seem to find what I was looking for. While the weather may have put a bit of a damper on the festivities, I never really felt as though I was had been granted access to anything out of the ordinary.

Corey Smith: Doors Open Milwaukee

Milwaukee Fire Department Boat

Riverside Theater

Doors Open Milwaukee

For doors open Milwaukee I took a tour of the S/V Denis Sullivan. It is the world’s only re-creation of a 19th century three-masted Great Lakes schooner. Since I found out a few years ago that you can take sailing lessons on the ship, I've wanted to check it out. The ship was much larger that I had anticipated. Although the ship was build in 2011, it actually

looked like an old ship-- weathered floors, rusty anchors and wooden masts.

The crew were also available around the shit to answer any questions we had. I talked with a man(right) that was standing near the wheel of the ship. He told me that the ship is sailed to Florida, via the St. Lawrence Seaway and the east coast, for the winter months. It is a 2 month journey to Miami where the ship sits until April. Then the Denis Sullivan is sailed back to Milwaukee.

The overall experience was great. I had fun taking pictures and it was interesting to see all the different parts of the ship up close and personal. I even got to see inside the navigation room. Touring the ship has made me want to sign up for the day sail even more. The last one is Oct. 2.

I went to a bridge house for doors open Milwaukee. It was neat to see how a hydraulics bridge worked. There were a lot of buttons and controls for it. The Bridge operator opened the bridge for us.

Shannon Wunderlich: Doors Open Milwaukee

For the Doors Open Milwaukee experience, Sam, Christian, Jessi and I decided that we needed to get to the top of the U.S. Bank building. Though Milwaukee is technically a "major" U.S. city, there's not a lot of opportunity for your average Joe to spend time on a double-digit floor of a skyscraper and we wanted to capitalize on the chance to view our city from its peak atop the tallest building around.

First and foremost, I was surprised at the amount of people in attendance. Sometimes I think I'm a little naive when it comes to wrapping my brain around just how many people can inhabit a certain square mileage - I guess I just didn't think there would be much of a turnout. But, I thought wrong.

Even before we reached the building, I'd heard that there was some sort of wait, which I found hard to believe. Upon our arrival, we were met with a steady flow of humans entering and exiting the building, which I still didn't quite buy. Only when we found ourselves at a standstill at the very back of a long line to the elevators was I able to understand just how many of my fellow citizens were in attendance.

After a 30ish minute wait, we finally reached the elevator that would bring us up to the observation deck.

Once the elevator doors opened, we were met by this room full of pipes, which I thought was really cool. It was sort of like being in the underbelly of the U.S. Bank building - you know, if underbellies were suspended hundreds of feet in the air and on top of everything else. It was especially interesting when compared with the clean cut marble and glass surroundings of the floor we'd just left.

The deck was packed with still more people, everyone clambering over one another to get a good look. I think the main thing I walked away with from this experience was a sort of reverence for the scale of human presence in this city. The bird's eye perspective of the city that allowed for such an expansive view sort of drove home the idea of the space that I and so many other people move through on a daily basis, that we claim as our own when addressing postcards. I think it's easy to get lost in the cityscape, to lose focus on just how much space is used on so many different planes. It was especially funny to see MIAD from way up there - this building that encompasses such a large part of my life getting lost in the labyrinth of surrounding structures.

Doors Open Milwaukee

For Doors Open Milwaukee, I decided to attended a location that I wouldn't normally go to.  I visited Old St. Mary's Church on Broadway Street.  The  reason behind the selection of location was to observe the  overwhelming nature the location seemed to possess.  I was interested in being overtaken by all of what surrounded me within each specific space.  When I walked into St. Mary's, I was in the presence of so many paintings on the wall, followed by statues of biblical figures.  I felt very overwhelmed, both physically and visually.  At one point, I even felt an uneasiness and I ended up leaving sooner than I wanted to.  There was such a sense of reverence and quietness that it almost became an atmosphere in which something bad was bound to happen. It was an odd experience to have in a place that it supposed to be holy and peaceful. It was a juxtaposition.

Open Doors Milwaukee-Lisa Press

For the weekend of Open Doors Milwaukee I chose to go visit the historic Pabst Brewery. I chose this building because I thought that it seemed the most interesting. However, Open Doors Milwaukee didn't really mean open doors for the Pabst building. Although we did get to see some of the old offices of the building I felt that the most interesting area was blocked off to the public. I felt that this distracted me from everything that we were being shown because we couldn't gain access to a portion of the building. Even more so this "portion" of the building seemed as if it would have been the most interesting of the tour had we been able to view it. Needless to say I was a bit disappointed that I hadn't gained as much access as I thought I would have.

Doors Open Milwaukee

For my Doors Open Milwaukee experience, I went to the US Bank obseration deck. The view from up there was amazing. It made Milwaukee look so beautiful and the architecture so much more interesting from a birds eye view. Buildings I am familiar with, now were mysterious and I struggled to guess which one I was looking at. The next stop for us was the Phister Hotel. The next tour would have been a long wait but it had started to pour outside so we stayed for lunch. The part of the hotel I did see was gorgeous and I definitely felt out of place in my street clothes. The most interesting part was the cafe inside the hotel. They had a sign stating Ipads were available for use while sitting in the cafe. I found this particularly amusing. I could not even imagine any of the places I normally spend my time having such a convienence as this for their customers. This was a new perspective in the sense that for other people, this kind of luxury is perhaps not the least bit surprising for them and just ordinary life. After lunch we stopped at a few churches along the way, accidently interrupting a wedding rehersal. The architecture of old churches has always been one my favorites. But not wanting to be a nuisance however, left quickly. Our last stop which was City Hall. They had tours available to go to the top of the bell tower but once we got there they were all full for the day and people were already signing up for tours on the following day. I thought it was interesting that they only had three tours a day allowing 25 people on each tour. So for Doors Open Milwaukee only 150 people, in a city of nearly a million, get the whole experience. However, they were allowing people to walk around freely. We took the liberty of taking the stairs all the way up to the sixth floor where we were met by a security guard who told us that only the first three floors were open to the public who were not taking a guided tour.

Over all the experience was worth the time. My favorite location was by far the US Bank observation deck. With better planning, I would have been able to see much more. I think the concept of Doors Open Milwaukee is fabulous however. The places I went to were places I would not have ventured to on my own but I am glad I did.

Shannon Wunderlich: Micro/Macro

So, I was the weirdo that decided to make one of my three walks without any shoes on.

Having decided to trek barefoot, my experience was a much more tactile one, one that forced me to confront the state of the ground that I walked on. Instead of allowing my eyes to glaze over the smaller details that comprised my environment, my feet called their attention down to the ground to reckon with the filthy state of our streets. I specifically mentioned the overwhelming presence of cigarette butts littered literally everywhere I looked and stepped. And so, for my intervention, I chose to do something with them.

Almost half of my route was comprised of alleyways, in which I stumbled across a few funny little break area benches, like this one. It seemed that the key element of appeal for these back alley getaways was the fact that you could sit down and have a smoke. Actually, that seemed to be the entire reason for these 'spaces' being brought about. Again, cigarettes affect the ways in which our space is utilized.

It's weird, right? How much is dictated by this fix that has become so engrained in our culture. It's also weird to me how acceptable it is to just throw your butts on the ground, even when there's a designated receptacle within arms reach. And it's not just weird, it's kind of annoying, right? I mean, we never really think about them all because we're so removed from our environments via cars and shoes and such, but it's actually a pretty gross thing to have assimilated into normalcy.

I sat down on one of these break area benches and looked around me.

Within the few feet surrounding the bench, my eyes were met with a considerable amount of (cigarette) butts strewn across the ground. I looked to my right and noticed the receptacle within arms reach. Dumb. You don't even have to get up to throw away your cigarette.

So, the spiteful bratty part of me wanted to fire back.

I collected every (cigarette) butt within my seated line of vision and piled them up on the bench.

Here's hoping that the next time Jimmy comes out back for a smoke break, he's confronted with the filth he's helped amass and feels inspired to extend his arm to his right the next time he's had his fix. Sometimes it's easy for the reality of a situation to lose its poignancy when distance comes into play. As the (cigarette) butts are distributed throughout the area, the actual amount of litter is lost. I guess my intent was to illustrate the degree of the issue by compressing the evidence and turning it back on to the offender.

home

Throughout the understanding of my growth, the term home has been thrown around much like the chalk used to write the letters, here the understanding of what a “home” is could correlate with the buildings on the corner of cass and juno. Between a church, and the new concrete architecture. The smells were what drew me to this place of a “home” the wind seemed to blow in the right direction, similar to my child hood. Finding the definition of home in the world has been the struggle but never a problem.

While walking, its proven that we think more, why not throw a question to the public and ask them as they pass through the place I felt closest to home about their definition of what home is?

The connection could be just their feet brushing away the chalk as they step over it, taking that question with them.