Milwaukee

Telling tales of brewers, brickmakers, ecologists, and engineers, Gurda explores the city’s complicated connections with its most precious resource and greatest challenge. You’ll meet the generations of people, from a Potawatomi chief to fur traders and fishermen, who settled on the small spit of land known as Jones Island; learn how Milwaukee’s unique water composition creates its distinct cream-colored bricks; visit Wisconsin’s first waterparks; and see how city leaders transformed the Milwaukee River—once described as a “vast sewer” with an “odorous tide”—into today’s lively and lovely Riverwalk.

Milwaukee: A City Built on Water is the sweeping chronicle of a critical natural resource that has weathered heavy use and flagrant abuse to emerge as a focal point of both celebration and concern in the twenty-first century.

“Milwaukee: A City Built on Water is a beautiful book. John Gurda is a dynamic storyteller and Christopher Winters’s photos bring this rich history to life. The historical perspective offered through the medium of water is brilliant, and one can see the incredible genius, drive, and creativity of Milwaukee’s founders as well as the challenges they sometimes created through shortsighted decision making. As one who knows a lot of the pieces of this history, I was struck by how we could not be doing the impactful work we are doing today were it not for the good work of those who came before us.”

—Ken Leinbach, Executive Director of the Urban Ecology Center