Devil’s Lake

1.

First, a tongue-colored door. Then a series of aged, arched windows gazing south and east toward the river. You notice the boarded-up panes, further down, painted a messy pastel rainbow. Person-sized plywood rectangles of blue, yellow, red, then blue, red, yellow, and then green, blue, and pink are shadowed and crossed by several balconies and a rusty fire escape that routes to the rooftop. The building has four separate but connected sections: a large foreboding cube hinged to several narrower segments, each varying in height, like the linked boxes kids draw to indicate the image of a “city.” You have not been inside. The exterior is a cement-colored white—brilliant with hidden light—like some moon fallen from the night to 3^rd and Juneau.

You are trapped on the rooftop. The building is awash in a sea of orange flame, sputtering from the pain and effort of eating boarded up windows. Fire licks with black ash and spits stain. You lamely wave your arms around in panic. You are catching the attention of no one. You’ll have to leap, of course, but first you gesture madly.

Push it out of your mind. You’re still outside, staring up at this quiet building, all alone in the old snow.

2.

Originally constructed as an experimental surgery lab in 1897, the Sydney Hih looms large in the center of an otherwise razed stretch of land in downtown Milwaukee. Scraped, erased, obliterated. Although the location where the building stands is in a major urban area, the blocks that surround it are partially, peculiarly vacant, eerily empty. Here there is rubble and dirt. Here there is flat land and blankness. In the 1960s the city tore down much of the area’s architecture—homes, small businesses—in order to construct a brand new portion of the state’s highway. It is a well-known story in these parts.

The inside, you think, might store one thousand baby grand pianos. A tune through the noon wind. Or perhaps a collection of imperfect taxidermy. The hunter himself could be peeking outside, watching you stumble and walk right around him.

Despite the infamously cold and windy Wisconsin winters, the barren streets, the slippery ice plates, you walk everywhere in Milwaukee. At times you are haunted by familiar voices; at times, turning a corner you glimpse the shadows of people you once knew. “Those who appeared in these hallucinations, for that is what they were, were always people [you] had not thought of for years, or who had long since departed … ” (Sebald). Because of this, you often wander by this building that—erect against the slate sky, against dense cement sidewalks, the dark road, listless clouds—seems to hover and pulse, as a glowing ghost that breaks the bank of the horizon.

The Sydney Hih is a remnant of the city’s past—an old punk club, an artist’s space, a famous symbol of late ’60s counterculture—and a history that you don’t yet realize. But you have a sense. You recognize when a place is haunted.

3.

These are the “lean years” remarks a friend, and they occur for you in a series of Midwestern cities. You are teaching college classes, earning little money with no insurance. You have only a few friends nearby, increased anxiety. Like many people you know—each operating from a similar island—you are adjusting, adjusting, according; adapting and attempting to accustom yourself to not knowing, not understanding much, but appreciating the sensation of roaming without being noticed. You are attemping to face with a firm awareness what is looming right here and right now, right in front of you.

4.

The Park East spur, which was never fully completed, was designed in order to connect Milwaukee’s downtown to I-43, which leads up toward rural Wisconsin. The route runs parallel to Lake Michigan. Milwaukee’s highway system, originally conceptualized in the 1950s, has always ben an uncannily futuristic, majestic, and symbolic part of the city’s identity. It is an old vision of the “new,” a space-age crisscross. Driving around downtown from Chicago or Madison, travelers find themselves twisting and pointing through the famous spaghetti maze of highway. Stories above ground level, each arc is an aerial view or supreme dip from the skyline. The system looks like a loose knot, a twist of bridges, or series of chaotic launch pads. Echoed in design by both the stadium and the bridges, the city’s symbol is a swirl of streets, coming from nowhere, leading toward nothing. An eternal cloud of motion—half an atom—the mountainous course implying that once caught in the colossol web, it may prove difficult for a stranger to steer out.

Understandably, the community that stretched along the proposed highway, which was to break into residential downtown, was anxious for the future of the land on which they were living. “The process by which the removal of residents from the path of the proposed western extension of this freeway is what spawned some of the first voracious protests and opponents, largely due to how the evictees were being treated and the condition of the replacement housing—where available” (Bessert).

As the story goes, in the early 1970s all major road construction was halted by the freeway’s gathering mass of local opponents, many citing environmental concerns as a reason for quitting the project. City officials battled for years while attempting to determine the future of the design. By the early ’80s—debate still raging—most residents wanted the partially constructed highway torn down, erased from the layout. After two more decades, in 2002, the city completed the demolition of the Park East Freeway. “Most of Juneau Avenue was razed, even the south side of the street, before the freeway was constructed. Spared were the Sydney Hih Complex, the Gipfel Brewery, and a few businesses around Fifth Street. With the removal of the Park East Freeway, there are approximately sixteen acres of open land awaiting development” (Historic Designation Study Report). The body of the city was mangled for a limb, the limb erased, leaving behind a phantom moonscape in the wake of destruction. Displacement and transference, for the sake of a street, creates sickness in the heart of a city. But the history of a place and its population is always peculiar—never simple, singular, or easy. “Like the places they inhabit, communities are bumpily layered and mixed, exposing hybrid stories that cannot be seen in a linear fashion … ” (Lippard). You walk to the side of the building, and watch across the street the contruction of a luxury hotel. You peek through the windows, kick gravel. All you know of the area in this instant is its blankness. There’s no one else in the road. The evidence of emptiness is a tear. It is the crack in which you stand. A scar and a pity.

5.

Colors bleed and the doors pop off their hinges. A million seagulls stream—wings flapping and making strange shapes in the mauve-speckled sunset. You see smokestacks and steeples. You see a slowly soaring skyline. The birds break form. They hitch themselves to the Hih by its hinges, then float the address east and drop it into Lake Michigan.

Traces of ruin, time’s neglect—a hesitant sense to reoccupy. “The menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense … ” (Jackson). You feel dizzy. There are obvious remnants of something grand, clues of attention and color. A hollowed out space is an outline of sorts, a shimmer of energy surrounding. It is a twice-told tale in these parts. It is a ghost story. You close your eyes. When you open them you turn around, facing downtown and the river. In the last decade, Milwaukee has experienced what many refer to as the grand “revitalization” of a famously blue-collar, post-industrial, underrated Midwestern city. What this means in part is erasure through palimpsest and money: new condos, gutted warehouses, trendy models. The transformation of a series of neighborhoods. You picture this messy monument’s light reflected in the mirored lens of a neighboring skyscraper. After all, being haunted is not always a terror; it can invoke the weight and romance of history. It can create wildness, bewilderment, metamorphosis, relief. Or: a hologram of an invented future.

6.

If anything, the Sydney Hih seems odd to you now because it has survived the last thirty years as an unused, empty, half-ignored opportunity. A gravestone, a marker, punctuation, reprieve. Development in this area is inevitable, and already as you pass by, across the street and down the way are billboards for proposed constructions. “While the specter of a wrecking ball has loomed over the Sydney Hih from the ’60s … plans have repeatedly failed to bloom. It’s as though the building has an invisible force field, repelling all who dare tear it down” (Boutell-Butler). Several owners have bought and sold the structure, and the mythology has continued to build. It has developed its own will. The skeleton is a testament to a city in stasis, one deciding what to identify as past. “For to great dreamers of corners and holes[,] nothing is ever empty … full and empty only correspond to two geometrical non-realities. The function of inhabiting constitutes the link between full and empty. A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited” (Bachelard). You picture pockets and puddles. If the city itself is a haunted house, than this corner is an eerie mystery.

The doctor is handed a scalpel. He slices into an abdomen, creating one long opening of the stomach. The nurse keeps time on a drum set. The torso of a body widens like a mouth, with secrets trapped in the song of its insides. An elevated audience observes with patience as the percussion fades into the evening. It attracts the attention of everyone in the neighborhood. Tim tim tum. Tim tim tum. A needle is thread, a tune hummed. The ill patient snores quietly, asleep—lulled by a forgotten lullaby.

Imagined scenes always occur like this: slow-motion mental pictures. “[W]hen i was a kid. back in the 70s. there was a hippie vegan cafe. we always got the plain yogurt with sesame seeds and even then it was a dive. roaches everywhere … i used to go to the unicorn in 85 /86 when i was 15/16 and drink jim beam … ” (Hampton). It is difficult to express the love one might have for an object. For a bare structure, empty thing, with no new use. “[C]razy times. there were so many bands there. black walls. i remember gus. he was kind enough to overlook my age. i had the worst fake id that i made out of a school id with letra set numbers scratched crookedly over the surface to fake my age” (Hampton).

An investigation is the process of discovering the value of what’s empty. “I was baptized in the grimy bathroom of Sydney Hih and born again as an art groupie. The walls vibrated with sweet and smarmy decadence” (SMKubica). You transform into a spirit, a stranger, a detective, a host. You are playing the curious apparition. When a place is filled with imagined events, reality, in comparison, is vacancy. Disorientation, a void, or disease.

7.

You admit that you are new to this town. You admit that you are prone to hyperbole. But there was a moment, you felt, when you first arrived, when everything was predicated on hope. And once the hope passed, there was denial, and once denial left everything was replaced with a strange and blurry—bleak and dreadful—seemingly incidental, acceptance.

Now there is upheaval and unrest. Now upset, unemployment, false economy. Lost houses, absent students, too much silence. It is a time like many others, presumably, with news across the nation claiming fragments of each new emergency. You are trying to account for the breakage. You find yourself walking aimlessly in order to keep track of things—to collect and to gather. One day you look up. The name hangs loosely from the roof in an oddly spaced pattern, large letters spelling: SYD NEY HIH. Like a message from an unseen source, as a matter of course, the title elongates as if slowly erasing.

8.

The charm of the Sydney Hih goes something like this: “In its 119 years, it has housed everything from a bank to an adult-video shop,” to a record label, a Mexican restaurant, and studio space. It has survived “more than half a dozen fires” (Carter). Although the Sydney Hih began as a laboratory for experimental surgeries, built by Nicholas Senn in the late 1800s, over the course of the following century it has morphed into a local legend. It is a monument and a monster of music, of punk rock and art history. “But [the] Sydney Hih’s real value is not in its architecture—it’s in the freaky, fantastic cultural scene that lasted decade upon decade” (Schumacher). The psychedelic spot served as a community space for musicians and a sanctuary for artists. The basement once held the infamous punk club, The Unicorn, which hosted the Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, and Nirvana, supposedly. In the ’70s the building was an infamous hub of counter-culture as well as a public space with rooms to rent or places to practice. “Moved into … town just in time to rent a spot at Syndey HIH. The floors were crooked, there were cockroaches and cock rockers … rent was cheap, and it was super awesome most of the time” (eater).

One morning the building is gone. Instead: a yellow couch in the center of the field, dotted with hundreds of blush pink roses. There is a tear in the fabric on one side, but no pillows or anyone in sight. It is not raining, there are no bugs, just—a sepia shadow in the shape of a missing foundation. You walk to the center of the lot, you drop into the arms of the sofa.

9.

What strikes you now—as you weed through archives of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel—is the wealth of nostalgic recollection, impassioned opinion, angry memory. You read many articles discussing the future of the building, but the comments sections are the most telling and compelling. Each of the individual testimonies capture the Sydney Hih’s dramatic past: “My husband and I named our daughter Sydney partially because that building played a big part of our story. His band and my band both played at The Unicorn in the 90’s … we had our first kiss there, I wrote band graffiti in the band room there … I saw lots of great shows there … saw the Smashing Pumpkins there before they hit … ” (CarolV). And: “[I]’m 23 and I know the history of this building, where have the rest of you been? It holds significance to the counter culture of the 60s and the punk rock movement of the 70’s/80’s. I even partied there when i was in highschool. Many look to Sydney Hih as the CBGB of Milwaukee. Is this enough to warrant its redevelopment? Not for me to say … .” (knockemoutthebox). Streams of input: “But what *actually* happened there that had a significant impact on Milwaukee? What’s [its] value beyond just reminiscence? Would preserving it have value as a museum, or as architectural seed for Park East, or what exactly? Is [its’] ’significance’ on a par with the Pabst brewery, city hall, Monticello, the Alamo … Just asking about a matter of degree … ” (Daykin).

The details commiserate and keep, capture and catch. You do some research, ask around. This is what people remember: the parties, graffiti, trash, and the shows—the bright and blinding rainbow. The food, the floors, the drugs, the love, the antics of many of its owners. The walls and hallways, corners and doors. “All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the ’objects’ of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a reaction; and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously … as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger” (James). You get a sense of the building through reactions. Everything, you think, as you research this place, amounts to the distance between what we haunt and what haunts us.

10.

The navy sky’s shadows roll by as you pass the Sydney Hih on your way toward Juneau and the Third Ward. You’re coming from Riverwest on an errand. The interest you feel as you pass by this place is always physical: like hypnotism, levitation, vertigo, or panic—it invokes imagined scenes, forecasts, visions. You are starting to feel at home here. You guess that if you try to understand a place’s past, you should start in a state of chaos and aim to remain there.

The door is a pink tongue, in a closed mouth, never moving. We tend to imagine incident into the absence, daydream images into enigma. We want what doesn’t exist more than we’re willing to admit, and we don’t believe in the unseen, but we exist for it. Here, though, and today, you stand outside the Sydney Hih, alone, during the middle of a dim day. Here there are blocks to be seen, holes to note, places to be passed and forgotten. There is much to be figured and listed. To be gathered and left blank. To be abandoned, unexplained, but spoken for.