What to Do in Milwaukee

Milwaukee is the easiest big-city weekend from Chicago, and it's a good one for kids and adults. It was once the biggest beer-producing city in the world, home to four of the world's largest breweries, Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst and Miller (Wikipedia). Only Miller still brews there. The city has since turned its old warehouse districts and brewery buildings into neighborhoods worth a walk, and the beer is still a big part of why you'd go.

Getting there is simple. Amtrak's Hiawatha takes about an hour and a half from Chicago Union Station to the Milwaukee Intermodal Station downtown. From there, the Hop streetcar runs to the Third Ward and downtown. See getting between Milwaukee and Chicago for trains, buses and driving.

Walk the Historic Third Ward

The Historic Third Ward is a warehouse district just south of downtown that was mostly empty a few decades ago. Now it's where you'll find galleries, boutiques, furniture stores, bars and restaurants, and it's the best part of the city to wander. It's close enough to downtown to walk, and the Hop has a stop at the Public Market. In September, Doors Open Milwaukee opens buildings around the city for free tours, and in the fall Gallery Night MKE brings people out to the galleries. Check the Third Ward site for dates.

Eat at the Milwaukee Public Market

The Milwaukee Public Market, at 400 N. Water St. in the Third Ward, opened in 2005. It's the place for a quick lunch or a picnic. There are 19 independent vendors, including seven bars, selling everything from cheese curds and Bloody Marys to seafood, Thai food and coffee. Take your food up to the Palm Garden seating on the second floor. The market is open 10am to 8pm Monday through Saturday and 10am to 6pm on Sunday, and a few vendors open earlier or later.

Get on the water

On a summer day, the lake is where you want to be. Edelweiss Cruises runs a historic narrated boat tour, plus dinner, brunch and themed cruises. MKE Boat Experiences, which docks at 1124 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr., runs sightseeing tours of the city's waterways, an adults-only happy hour cruise and its Brew City boat party series. Check both sites for schedules, since most cruises run in the warmer months.

Take a brewery tour

You could fill a weekend with these, and plenty of people do. Here are the ones we'd pick.

• Lakefront Brewery, 1872 N. Commerce St. This is the tour to do if you only do one. It takes 50 minutes and includes four 8-ounce pours and a souvenir. It's $13 Monday to Thursday and $16 Friday to Sunday, and kids under 13 are free. Lakefront hands you a beer at the start instead of making you wait until the end. The beer hall serves food too, including cheese curds.
• Miller Brewery Tour, 4251 W. State St., in Miller Valley. The big-brewery version, with nearly 170 years of history. Tours end with beer in the visitor center, the Bavarian-style Miller Inn or, in season, the beer garden.
• Sprecher Brewery, in suburban Glendale. Founded in 1985, it was Milwaukee's first craft brewery since Prohibition, and it's best known now for root beer sweetened with honey. Tours take about 45 minutes and end in the indoor beer garden, where the samples include sodas as well as beer.
• Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery, 917 W. Juneau Ave. Pabst doesn't brew here anymore. The first version of this page called the old brewery defunct, but the former corporate headquarters now runs beer history tours, with taverns and a café open to the public.
• Great Lakes Distillery, 616 W. Virginia St. We used to call it Wisconsin's only spirits distillery, which it isn't anymore. It was founded in 2004 and was the first distillery to open in the state after Prohibition. It runs tours and has a tasting room.

To see what all that beer money built, tour the Pabst Mansion, 2000 W. Wisconsin Ave., the Pabst family's 1890s Gilded Age house. Check in at the visitor center in The Marq, the building just west of the mansion. It's open 10am to 4pm Sunday through Thursday and until 5pm on Friday and Saturday, and reserving ahead is a good idea.

See the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum is the city's best-known building, and the reason is Santiago Calatrava's Quadracci Pavilion, which opened on the lakefront in 2001. Its sunscreen, the Burke Brise Soleil, is a pair of steel wings that open when the museum opens, flap at noon and close at 10pm, weather permitting, according to the museum. Be there at noon. Inside, the collection has nearly 35,000 works, which makes it the largest art museum in Wisconsin (Wikipedia). It's especially strong on German art and on American paintings, and the Georgia O'Keeffe paintings are a highlight.

Adult admission is $27, and kids 12 and under get in free. Go on a Thursday if you can. Admission is pay-what-you-wish from 4 to 8pm. The museum is at 700 N. Art Museum Dr. and is closed on some weekdays, so check the hours before you go. The old version of this page said it was free on the first Thursday of the month, which is no longer the deal.

For a different kind of museum, the Harley-Davidson Museum, 400 W. Canal St., covers the company from the backyard shed where William Harley and Arthur Davidson built their first motorcycle in 1903. It has two floors of bikes and memorabilia, and it's open daily from 10am to 5pm.

Go to a Brewers game

The Brewers play at American Family Field, which was called Miller Park when this page was first written. It got its new name in 2021. The fan-shaped retractable roof can close in under 10 minutes, so a rainy day won't cancel the game (Wikipedia). The real draw is the tailgating. Fans show up in the parking lots a couple of hours early with grills, brats, cheese and beer, and throw a ball around while they wait. If you're coming from Chicago, a Cubs series is the one to book, since a lot of the crowd will have made the same trip.

Summerfest and frozen custard

Summerfest has been held on the lakefront since 1968 and bills itself as "The World's Largest Music Festival," a title Guinness certified in 1999 (Wikipedia). It runs over three weekends from late June into early July at Henry Maier Festival Park, next to the Third Ward. Hotels fill up, so book early if your trip lands then.

Whenever you go, have frozen custard, Milwaukee's answer to ice cream. Kopp's posts each day's flavors on its site, which is useful if you're driving across town for one.

Photos by gail des jardin, Gary Deness, the queen of subtle