Urban Hikes: Milwaukee (Sunday, May 3, 2015) Around the Ambassador Hotel

Learning to use the zoom. This guy was walking across North 25th Street around 10:30 a.m. Sunday morning.

 Paul made the call. Let's stay until Monday, taking a long weekend after the Replacements Show at the Eagle Ballroom. He also recalled that Jeffrey Dahmer was the Milwaukee Cannibal. Turns out, after some compulsive I-phone use, that Dahmer's dwelling was located only blocks from where we stayed--and he purportedly committed one of the murders at the Ambassador in 1987.

 With our coffees in hand, Paul and I walked to the site where the Oxford Apartments once stood at 924 S. 25th Street on Sunday morning. The building containing Dahmer's "house of horrors" was torn down just a few years after his arrest. Now there's just a vacant lot on a corner. Internet articles claim that victims' families do not want any memorials constructed and that the city forbids any kind of development other than a parking lot on the site where the building once stood.

 Of course, we were cautioned by the front desk clerk not to walk to far in the neighborhood around The Ambassador. Inwardly, we scoffed. It resembles Carondelet, where we live in St. Louis, so we felt pretty at home. We were approached by a few panhandlers and Paul gave them change. Just like in Carondelet, spectacular houses such as the ones above stand next to the boarded up shells of old dwellings. A man was painting his home on this street, and pictured below are the details on a giant house across the street-- "a German mansion" according to the next store neighbor, who was hanging out smoking in his front yard-- that belongs to "a dentist and an art dealer."

Still haven't figured out the light functions on my new camera, but couldn't resist talking a photo of this porch and solitary daffodil in bloom.

Why we came: The Replacements, right at the Eagle Ballroom across the street from the Ambassador.

The venue, across the street from the Ambassador Hotel.  The top floor houses the Eagle Ballroom, the biggest venue in the building.  The archways are open so that concert goers look outside while enjoying a drink from the bar just outside the ballroom's door.

Picture of the Ambassador in the hotel lobby--as it stood in 1937.  It was built in 1928 and later restored.

Art Deco elevator door in the lobby, reminscient of Gatsby.

Kind of a cool shot after the show. I saw another concert goer taking it first with his phone.