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Old Posted Apr 16, 2012, 9:31 PM
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simms3_redux simms3_redux is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: San Francisco
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^^^My friend lives on Terrace (actually has 2 houses on Terrace). One faces the lake and the other is across the street. They are beautiful, but I might point out that the nicest houses in Milwaukee are actually quite cheap by big city standards, and most require a substantial amount of work. There are surprisingly neighborhoods in Jacksonville that look exactly like that with gridded streets, waterfront homes from the late 1800s through the 1920s, etc etc. Of course, once again the core of the two cities are completely different. Milwaukee's is very impressive and the view of all the church steeples from the highway heading south to the airport is amazingly beautiful (looks European almost).

Still, even with Milwaukee's intact core, it is so old it does feel a little like it is still decaying, which adds to the kind of unique Midwestern ambiance of the place (much like Chicago in that regard). Totally different feel and different culture than St. Louis, another beer town. I wish Jacksonville had kept its building stock so that in the case it was never gentrified anyway, it would have that cool, gritty crumbling appearance and the opportunity to gentrify at a later point. Instead the core is less than crumbling; it is dead completely. There are still outlying crumbling industrial wastelands that could conceivably be turned into something.
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