The Cream City on Lake Michigan — where Milwaukee's cream-brick Victorian architecture lines the Milwaukee River, the Harley-Davidson Museum preserves 120 years of American motorcycle culture, Santiago Calatrava's Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum is one of the finest pieces of contemporary architecture in North America, and the German immigrant brewers who arrived in the 1840s created the American lager industry that still defines how the world drinks beer
Milwaukee (580,000; metro 1.6 million) is Wisconsin's largest city, on the western shore of Lake Michigan — one of the great industrial cities of the American Midwest, built on the fortunes of the beer, tanning, and metalworking industries and defined by the largest concentration of 19th-century cream-colored Milwaukee brick (a distinctive Lannon limestone clay) of any American city. The city is nicknamed 'Cream City' for the distinctive pale yellow hue of this locally-made brick, still visible throughout the older neighbourhoods of Walker's Point, Brady Street, Historic Third Ward, and the M…
The Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and Ojibwe peoples occupied the three rivers confluence (Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Kinnickinnic Rivers, all flowing into Lake Michigan) for centuries — 'Millioke' in the Algonquin language (approximately 'the good land', 'the great council place', or 'gathering place by the water', with the exact meaning contested). Solomon Juneau established the first permanent European settlement in 1833, and Milwaukee was incorporated as a city in 1846. The German wave of 1848 (the 'Forty-Eighters' — intellectuals and craftspeople fleeing the failed democratic revolutio…