Milwaukee's a tavern town, so while some places endure for decades, many bars tend to come and go in the course of a year. Sometimes the changes are so numerous that it feels nearly impossible to keep up. To help you get up to speed, here are some of the changes in the Milwaukee scene in 2011.
When Linda Sackett was a girl, her Milwaukee firefighter father was assigned to the fire station on 1st and Virginia. He would sometimes come home complaining of a poor night's sleep. The lack of shut eye was not due to alarms clanging in the wee hours. A noisy tavern a block away at 1st and Florida kept him awake. A few months ago his daughter bought that tavern.
These days, the bar scene in the Walker's Point neighborhood is expanding exponentially, with at least a handful of new ones opening up within the last year. But, in this case, new doesn't always mean better.
One of the small perks of my job at OnMilwaukee.com is my office that I share with the rest of the editorial team. It's a big, bright sunny room with three gigantic windows that overlook the hub of the East Side: the intersection of North and Farwell Avenues.
With The Social gone, Milwaukeeans voted one of the area's newcomers, The Bomb Shelter, as their new favorite in Walker's Point. The Bomb Shelter opened a year ago at 1517 S. 2nd St., in the space formerly inhabited by The Monkey Bar.