The Grand Walk

Milwaukee's Wisconsin Avenue is one of the Midwest's great civic boulevards, lined with architectural landmarks that span nearly 200 years of American design. On this walking tour, you'll trace the street's transformation from a fashionable residential promenade to a cultural and commercial hub. You'll also hear about the characters – from beer barons to a nesting mallard – who gave this avenue its personality.

The tour starts outside the Milwaukee Public Library, a Neo Renaissance palace that once housed both the city's books and its natural history collection, including a lion cub named Simba who briefly lived on the roof. You'll head east along Wisconsin Avenue, past the restored Grand Theater, where the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra now performs, and the Riverside Theater, a 1928 vaudeville house that hosted Abbott & Costello, Ray Charles, and Bruce Springsteen before narrowly escaping demolition.

Midway through, you'll cross the Milwaukee River, stopping to learn about Gertie the Duck, a nesting mallard who became a national celebrity in 1945 and inspired 37 consecutive newspaper stories. The tour continues past the Iron Block Building – a Civil War-era cast iron structure with a genuinely scandalous origin story – the ornate Wells Building, and the Pfister Hotel, where the ghost of original owner Charles Pfister is said to still roam the corridors. The tour ends at the Milwaukee Art Museum, its iconic white brise soleil wings spread above the lakefront.

On this 75-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Explore the Gas Light Building's Art Deco lobby and learn the rhyme locals use to read its weather-forecasting flame
• Visit the US Federal Courthouse, a Romanesque granite building with a five-story glass-ceilinged atrium
• Hear how Schlitz Palms beer garden hosted Woodrow Wilson and temperance activist Carrie Nation – both of whom declined a drink
• Walk past Northwestern Mutual's 1914 Classical Revival headquarters, with its ten Corinthian columns
• See Mark di Suvero's 40-foot steel sculpture The Calling at O'Donnell Park
• Learn how Milwaukee's first permanent structure, Jacques Vieau's 1820 fur trading post, stood on this very route

Wisconsin Avenue rewards the curious walker – bring comfortable shoes and plenty of time to duck inside.