Who said you can’t go home again?
Yes, you can! I did! and it isn’t returning to Casablanca, where I was born. No. To Wisconsin, at the heart of the Midwest, more specifically to Milwaukee (aka Brew City), the city I consider my “American” home, where I first “landed” as an immigrant in 1964, went to university, and most of all where I met my husband, Owen. Milwaukee is where I adopted my new national identity.
At first glance, Lake Michigan, this vast inland sea, reminded me of the Atlantic Ocean I had left behind. I can still recall my amazement at learning that a ferry ride to the opposite shore took 5 ½ hours. I had never seen the achingly blue skies of an icy January, when the lake became more spectacular still, its glaucous expanse etched in frilly waves of frozen foam. Gazing at the placid waters of summer, I recalled as a nostalgic visitor how I would break the silence of an overnight snowfall with the sinking of my boots into crisp new snow. I almost longed once more for those chilly days even though I knew that the quasi-polar winters of yore came with frozen toes, icicles dangling from tree branches, and parallel parking on city streets glistening with black ice.
This time, I elected to stay at The Knickerbocker Hotel, a block from the lake and from Milwaukee’s founder, Solomon Juneau’s log cabin. The imposing red brick building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Everyone suspected in the late sixties that its in-house Italian restaurant, Sally’s, with its red neon signage, subdued lighting and private dining rooms, doubled as a mafia hangout. The mafia link has long been broken, and Sally’s has morphed into The Knick, an independent establishment serving freshly made specialties like White Pizza, Ahi Tuna Tartare, and a heaping green salad artfully topped with a ball of Wisconsin made Burrata exploding with cream. The ornate bar is crowded with young professionals at cocktail hour, but just a touch of imagination will bring back images of mafiosi nursing a drink at a corner of the bar.
One thing that sets Milwaukee apart from other large cities is its walkability. The evening I arrived, I attended a taping of the popular PBS Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me radio show. Just a few short blocks separate the “Knick” from downtown’s extravagant Riverside Theatre, opened in 1925 and beautifully restored, and one of the most ornate theatres in Wisconsin. The streets were still quite lively around 10PM when my friends and I returned to my hotel and walked three blocks to the French celebration of Bastille Day on July 14th, the largest such festival in the US. While by the riverfront, the Italians were celebrating their own festival with food and music.
Milwaukee has acquired a more sophisticated skyline since my husband and I left for California in the early seventies. The striking Milwaukee Art Museum defines the city and its lakefront. Three of the world’s greatest architects, Eero Saarinen, David Kahler and Santiago Calatrava, were commissioned for its design. The iconic building sprouts wings with the span of a 747, thanks to its breathtakingly original Burke Brise Soleil, a moveable sunscreen that unfurls atop the vaulted galleries. Rare is the person who doesn’t stand, mouth agape in wonder, inside Calatrava’s iconic Quadracci Pavilion and its adjoining galleries that jut into the lake like the prow of a ship. The Milwaukee Art Museum ranks as one of the largest in the country with its 150,000 square feet of gallery space and its world-renowned collection of Haitian art.
During the rediscovery of “my” city, I hopped on the latest addition to public transportation. The aptly named The Hop is a free streetcar that circles downtown all the way to The Historic Third Ward District on the banks of the Milwaukee River. In my time, the river was best avoided for its foul smell. “The Bloody Third” in the late 1800s was a refuge for Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine, and later one for Italian immigrants. Today, the Third Ward is home to coveted condos and riverbank restaurants built with Milwaukee’s famous “cream city” bricks. I walked around restored warehouses revitalized into a vibrant art and fashion district. Fortunate residents occupy large lofts and studios, and need only cross the street to frequent galleries, hip boutiques and one of the country’s most exciting indoor markets, the Milwaukee Public Market.
What first caught my attention was a line of customers in front of St. Paul Fish Co. A large black board proclaimed OYSTERS and their provenance, and in smaller script, fried oyster rolls. I have never been one to turn my back on a fried oyster roll, and I waited for a seat to open up. A trio of servers stood behind the counter, expertly shucking Hammerheads from Massachusetts, Moon Dancer from Maine, or Blue Points from Virginia. In less time than it takes to shuck a live bivalve, the server/cook/oyster shucker appeared before me to take my order. I unwrapped the enormous sandwich to take a bite of the roll bulging with fried oysters doused in a heavenly secret sauce. I toyed with, then discarded, the idea of ordering another, and reluctantly gave up my seat to the next oyster aficionado standing behind me. My craving fulfilled, I ambled over to refrigerated stalls lined with rows of award-winning Wisconsin cheeses that rarely make it outside the Dairy State. More sampling kept me busy until the aroma of exotic spices lured me to an open display occupied by The Spice House, a long-established spice merchant specializing in exotic spices and bags of unusual herb mixtures from around the globe.
I had saved a day for exploring my old East Side neighborhood, along Prospect, a wide avenue lined with centuries-old brick mansions, many transformed into residential high-rises. Past Brady Street, a hang-out for hippies and home to Glorioso’s, the one and only Italian deli where my grandfather once purchased dried fava beans and hand-made pasta. I used to follow him, ignoring the fishy scent of dried codfish and stepping over sacks of elbow macaroni, to pursue my own culinary explorations. He enjoyed conversing with the owner, Mr. Glorioso, who kept him in pickled vegetables and slivers of home-cured meats. I was a little disappointed this time to step into an upgraded location that mirrored New York or San Francisco’s famed Eataly emporium, while the old Glorioso’s “authentic” Italian feel had melted away with the decades.
A dozen blocks separated me from our old neighborhood, a quirky two-block stretch of Downer Avenue, far enough to walk off Glorioso’s tiramisu cannolo. Boswell’s, the largest bookstore in town, commands a good chunk of pavement. Lovers of foreign movies still flock to the Downer cinema, Wisconsin’s oldest, built in 1915. In my time, college “potheads” puffed on the illicit herb in the depths of its rickety seats. A busy café and restaurant occupy a street corner, while our neighborhood market of yore, Sendik’s, still caters to the East Side’s eclectic mix of students and faculty. Glancing through its large bay windows, I imagined my grandfather testing the ripeness of a melon and inhaling the fragrance of fresh coriander (cilantro), in old times a rare find.
A block or two to the north led me to the old homestead, my in-laws’ Victorian home built in 1918, just 2 blocks from the university. Soon after we were married, my husband turned their attic into the coolest loft in town. Often, as newlyweds on evening walks, my husband and I dreamed of restoring historic brick mansions or carriage houses in various states of disrepair, some with private steps leading to lakefront beaches of fine sand.
I stifled nostalgia while stepping onto my “memory lane,” Hartford Avenue. My husband not only attended Hartford Avenue elementary school, but we met on a fateful day in 1969, when Owen pushed my bed in a bed race. Little did we suspect that my clinging to a disintegrating bed on wheels and my future husband puffing behind me and rolling in dead last would lead to 52 years of marriage. A mere block away appeared the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “my” campus, where I donated my father’s collection of rare books on Morocco to its world-renowned American Geographical Society Library. The AGSL was established in 1978 when the research collections of the society had to relocate, and ownership was transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Our map library is second in scope to the Library of Congress,” explained the young curator, the most enthusiastic Georgia Brown, who oversees the world-renowned collection of maps and close to 2 million other items. In following my guide through rows of stacks in the basement, I sensed I had come full circle linking my hometown of Casablanca to Milwaukee. Mission accomplished!
