Towering over the lakefront festival grounds in Milwaukee, the American Family Insurance Amphitheater is the largest stage at Summerfest, the sprawling music festival that bills itself as one of the biggest in the world. Originally opened in 1987 as the Marcus Amphitheater, the venue anchors the southern end of Henry Maier Festival Park and serves as the headline arena for the festival's marquee performers each summer. With a capacity of around twenty-three thousand, the amphitheater combines c.....

Summerfest's wave-roofed pavilion turned a temporary stage into lakefront architecture. The BMO Pavilion at Henry Maier Festival Park on Milwaukee's Lake Michigan shoreline opened for Summerfest's 45th anniversary in June 2012, the centrepiece of a 35-million-dollar redevelopment of the festival grounds. Designed by Eppstein Uhen Architects with a swooping wave-inspired roof covering more than an acre - roughly 50,000 square feet - the venue replaced the old temporary Classic Rock Stage at the s.....

A corner tavern that once hosted anarchist book clubs became Milwaukee's CBGB. The building at 2496 South Wentworth Avenue in Bay View has operated as a bar since its construction in 1910, and its upstairs room hosted an Italian anarchist circle in 1914 and live music as early as the mid-1910s. The Cactus Club name and country-western theme arrived in 1957 under Alice and Cliff Rose, whose family ran the place for four decades - Barbara and Bobby Rose taking over in 1989 - before bartender Eric .....

The site has been an airfield, a Cold War Nike missile base, and - since 1970 - the permanent home of what Guinness certified as the World's Largest Music Festival. Henry Maier Festival Park, 75 acres on Lake Michigan at 200 North Harbor Drive in Milwaukee, is the purpose-built festival ground of Summerfest and the densest concentration of permanent outdoor stages in America. Summerfest itself began in 1968, the brainchild of Mayor Henry Maier after a visit to Munich's Oktoberfest, scattered ac.....

Theodore Roosevelt delivered a campaign speech here in 1912 with a would-be assassin's bullet still in his chest - refusing treatment until he finished. The Miller High Life Theatre, at 500 West Kilbourn Avenue in downtown Milwaukee, opened as the Milwaukee Auditorium on 21 September 1909 and has anchored the city's civic life ever since. The origin was civic self-help: after fire destroyed the Industrial Exposition Building in 1905, Milwaukee's business community formed a stock corporation and.....

The theatre earned its name by fighting to keep the Milwaukee River out of its basement - and more than one piece of scenery has ended up in the water off the cramped loading alley. The Riverside Theater at 116 West Wisconsin Avenue opened on 29 April 1928 inside the 12-storey Empire Building, a French Baroque vaudeville and movie palace commissioned by RKO. Architects Kirchhoff and Rose - designers of New York's Palace Theatre - dressed the hall in ivory, gilt and peacock blue, with roughly 2,.....

Milwaukee's convention center has answered to six names in under three decades - a corporate rebranding streak that finally settled when a hometown financial firm put its name on the biggest expansion in the building's history. The venue at 400 West Wisconsin Avenue opened in 1998 as the Midwest Express Center and is now the Baird Center, run by the Wisconsin Center District. The original Flemish and German-inspired building was the largest design-build project in Wisconsin history when it repl.....