The park that Time Forgot

Parks are a unique part of the urban landscape that so often take a hit when it comes to preservation. Milwaukee is a city gifted with many beautiful and unique Urban landscapes that were originally created to bring people to a spot where an appreciation of nature can meet with an urban culture. Lake Park is an area of Milwaukee I have only been to once prior, on a date to the Lake Park Bistro to be exact. I remember looking out of the window, down the “cliff” and off into the water, not knowing and understanding that the building I was in stood to represent more than a posh place to eat. When we re-visited to space in the daylight, the park took on an entirely new feeling. The same building that houses this posh, country-club feeling restaurant with a menu priced to match, also maintains a downstairs community room, a set of beautiful staircases and beyond a park of memories both architecturally, but archeologically significant.

Not only is this a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, a spot where there are Indian burial mounds, apparently a nuclear monitoring station and croquet fields, but also a small pieces of history, a time capsule. It is like different spots in this park allow you to be transported to different part of time. In one spot you can stand on top of (very possibly) bodies of the native people of Wisconsin, in another spot you can stand where carriages once carried people out for their daily jaunt and yet another you can look out over a “bay” like area where ships needed the guiding light of an oil –fed lighthouse to steer them and their cargo to safety. The Lake park area is one that can compartmentalize these moments in time and keep them fresh and as useful to the understanding of not only a group of people, but the paths on which these different times and people collided.

Other than the actual landscape, the buildings on site hold the same feeling of time-transport. The Lighthouse we went inside, along with the adjoining keeper’s quarters, was like taking a small step into the past. Climbing up a spiraling and ever shrinking space into the top of the light house, one could feel the presence of many thousands of trips up and down to feed the light that held such importance to people of Milwaukee and all over that used it for their own safety. The exhausting climb (for someone like me, a smoker and not the most fit individual), it was possible to imagine, but also admire the fortitude it took for one person to take such responsibility to climb, over and over and over these stairs that, to me, represented the dreaded physicality such a beautiful area promotes. Humbling though it was to look out across the water of Lake Michigan and down to the downtown area, the same sense of awe can be felt when stepping onto a mount of such spiritual importance to a native people, like standing on the burial mound. The part is a time capsule. It is a bridge (with beautifully restored bridges!) that connects people and places and timelines together in such a way that its importance cannot be ignored or muted.