With Cream City Chronicles, Historian John Gurda discusses the reason behind some of the idiosyncrasies of the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a resident and native of the City of Milwaukee, it is rather disappointing to not know too much about it. Some of the items in the book are famous enough that I heard about it from my Mom, but it is still nice to read about it. The book takes its title from the Cream-Colored bricks that used to be popular for buildings in the local area.

The book is a compilation of newspaper articles written for the Milwaukee Sentinel paper and later on for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel when it was formed. Thus, none of the articles are too long or toilsome to read. The book is mainly organized under some overarching subject. It starts with the founding of a trading post that came to be Milwaukee and the main personalities that propelled it forward. So we see stories of Solomon Juneau; the first mayor of Milwaukee, Byron Kilbourn; the guy who hated the other founders so much that he made the roads crooked, Increase Lapham; a polymath naturalist and many more. While the book is loosely chronological, it does go out of the way to talk about big areas and other places of interest.

Along the way, we can see the problems that Milwaukee has had with separate neighborhoods, the shifting of economies and the crumbling of old factories and so on. Take the Tory Hill Neighborhood for instance. It was obliterated in 1964 because of the construction of the Marquette Interchange. Due to that, I had never heard of the place. There are stories of the Mitchell Park Domes, the story of water and how it relates to the City, the shifting ethnic footprint in many areas.

I don’t know if it is difficult to find this book though, and it is rather specialized in scope. I can’t imagine many people from Atlanta, Georgia for instance, reading this book for fun but it is really well done. I mean, I have a bias since I am from the City, but there is a lot of stuff to read about even if you don’t particularly like the City of Milwaukee. In that vein, I am glad that I found this book. It did a good job of explaining why the bridges don’t meet exactly and why some of the streets cut diagonally through the otherwise orthogonal plan.

So in that sense, the book was extremely enjoyable and understandable. ( )

I received this book in exchange for an honest review.

Being married to somebody who was born and raised in Wisconsin and being a past resident who frequently travelled to Milwaukee, I found this book very interesting. I enjoyed the history and background to the cityand would recommend this read to anybody who likes learning about the past in the areas that live and visit. ( )