A Visit to the Pabst Mansion

Last day in Milwaukee.

The Wisconsin office bought this fried chicken feast for my last lunch and we all sat and ate it together. That was nice.

I can't get enough pictures of Miller Park. I would like to be inside when they retract that dome.

I had time for one last touristy activity before returning to the airport. I went with..

The Pabst Mansion!

Nearby sign:

Captain Frederick Pabst

(1836-1904)

Of German birth, Pabst became a ship's captain in the 1850s and moved to Milwaukee in the 1860s. He later joined his father-in-law's brewery (founded 1844), which was renamed the Pabst Brewery in 1889. By the 1890s it was the world's largest lager beer brewery, and he was Milwaukee's leading citizen.

The captain's elegant Flemish Renaissance Revival mansion was designed by George Bowmen Ferry and constructed on fashionable Grand Avenue 1890-93. Its pavilion housed the Pabst Brewery exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Between 1908 and 1975 five Catholic archbishops resided here. In 1978 Wisconsin Heritages, Inc. purchased the property.

Pabst also erected the city's first skyscraped (1891-92), rebuilt the Pabst Theater (1895), operated by the Whitefish Bay Resort, headed the Wisconsin National Bank, owned a local hotel and many saloons, a hops farm and street railway in Wauwatosa, and hotels and restaurants elsewhere in the nation.

This is the aforementioned World's Fair pavilion that was later slapped on to the side of their house. The family used it as a summer porch.

Currently it serves as the tour center and gift shop.

I didn't buy anything in there but I was amused while I perused.

The Catholic bishops that lived in the mansion really Jesused up the pavillion. Luckily they didn't do too much damage to the rest of the building.

I liked that this place was owned by a beer baron because there were lots of classy beer references hidden all over the place. This column is wrapped in hops.

A fun fact was that the mansion had electricity but the power plant was owned by the factories and the power went out when they closed for the night. So many of the fixtures were set up to provide both electric and gas lighting.

Pabst clearly stole his facial hair fashion from Adolphus Busch. Sad.

I'm pretty sure that this was cardboard treated to look like a tin ceiling. The wallpaper in this place was hard to understand or believe.

I don't know if it had a purpose or they were just trying to be cool but the tiles in the conservatory didn't have grout and there was sand underneath, which caused them to slightly shift around when walked upon.

I really liked their taste in artwork. A lot of it was depictions of people having a good time.

I may need this painting. Cherubs and the Mystery of Brewing.

The bannisters had giant hops on them.

I guess Pabst Brewery bested and then ate one of its rivals, the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company. They bought a lot of the stuff from an auction at the Blatz mansion and a few pieces of it were on display here.

"I'm from Milwaukee, and I ought to know! It's Draft Brewed Blatz beer, wherever you go." The sailor dude is Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 The Wizard of Oz.

This was a fun servant call system.

I think the way you know you're rich is when there's a mural on your home safe.

Milwaukee airport did not disappoint in its array of cheese related clothing.

Cheesy Times in Milwaukee

I like Milwaukee. It might be too cold for me to live any farther north than I do now though...

One of the bigwigs brought back some cheese curds from a road trip. They were nice and salty. I guess the way you tell if curds are fresh is that they kind of squeak against your teeth while you chew them. It was kind of a strange sensation.

When I heard Kopp's was like a local, better version of Culver's I signed up.

Kopp's Wikipedia entry features this gem:

In June 2010, Vice President Joe Biden visited a Kopp’s Frozen Custard location while campaigning for Democratic Senator Russ Feingold. Biden asked the manager of Kopp’s what he owed for his custard. In response, the manager stated "Don’t worry, it’s on the house. Lower our taxes and we’ll call it even." In response, Biden came back later to the manager and said, "Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time?" The story was covered by both local and national news agencies.

I hadn't had any dairy products in about 20 minutes so this sundae came just at the nick of time.

Unbeknownst to me my cousin Caleb goes to school in Milwaukee. Tell you what, when you have 20+ cousins it's an accomplishment just remembering all of their names. Luckily I still had some time left in the week to meet Caleb for dinner.

There was a cool kid taco place called Vagabond really close to his dorm.

Watching relatives who you knew as kids turn into adults is kind of weird.

Miller Park with the roof retracted.

High Life at Miller Park

Decided to hit a Brewers game after work today. Gotta make every Milwaukee day count.

The hotel room had a magnifier mirror thing which was nice because I've been wondering what it would be like to have a giant nipple and now the mystery is solved.

I didn't want to have to deal with parking the rental car in downtown on a game day and I couldn't really anticipate exactly how many brews the Brewers would enduce me to imbibe, so I figured a shuttle of some sort was the way to travel. Nearby Mo's Irish Pub Wauwatosa had one. Boom.

I made friends with some baseball bros. We had some pretty deep, meaningful conversations that for some reason I can't recall.

The Brewers were playing the Rockies. Neither team was the Cardinals which was sad for everyone involved.

I was initially going to get the cheapest ticket available but they skillfully upsold me to the club level for $22. I was happy with my investment. 

It turned out that the club level was baller.

There was free tea, water, and coffee.

Workers were pushing around carts full of fancy snacks that the people in the suites could buy.

I was pretty impressed with the bathrooms as well. The sinks were really ornate, for example.

Miller Park has a retractable dome which was pretty exotic to me.

I was wondering how they would handle indoor fireworks in case of a homerun, and it was revealed to me. They pretty much just shot them sideways.

Why is beer not dispensed this way?

When it came time stuff my face I looked for the Wisconsinest food available. I found this badass Wisconsin steak and cheese sandwich featuring applewood smoked cheddar on a pretzel bun. It was really good.

They even melted the cheese right off of a wheel with a heat lamp before slathering it on the sandwich in a pro move I've only seen once before at a Berlin Christmas market.

After the game I sampled a little nightlife. A friend of mine who lived in the area recommended I visit Scaffidi's Hideout. 

It was a nice little dive.