Milwaukee Public Museum
Tropical garden surroundings, tranquil music and hundreds of exotic butterflies dancing in the air all around you: It sounds like paradise, but this colorful wonderland exists inside the Milwaukee Public Museum. The natural and human history museum covers almost any subject you can imagine, including free-flying butterflies from around the world in the Puelicher Butterfly Museum.
With more than 4.5 million specimens in subjects including anthropology, history, botany and zoology, the museum allows groups to focus on what excites them. Despite the wide assortment of topics, some exhibits stand out to most visitors, such as “The Streets of Milwaukee.”
“When you walk down ‘The Streets of Milwaukee,’ you smell beer and sausages,” said Settle. “It is a walk back in time to the early 1800s. You can see businesses from back then and what they would be like. For someone who was born and raised in Milwaukee, you feel a real sense of ownership to the museum.”
The exhibit recently received a renovation for its 50th anniversary with additional storytelling elements like the newly incorporated Smell-O-Vision technology.
A recent addition to the 1884 museum, the “Crossroads of Civilization” exhibit chronicles the ancient civilizations of Africa, Europe and Asia with mummies and life-size scenes from history.
Discovery World
The Milky Way unfolds before each person who steps in the Discovery World’s Hive 3D Environment. Using virtual technology that responds to a user’s actions, visitors can tour the Milky Way, Boeing aircraft and even nearby neighborhoods in this interactive exhibit.
This humbling experience is just one of 14 interactive science, technology and freshwater exhibits located in the 120,000-square-foot facility of Discovery World.
“It’s definitely one of the most popular attractions in Milwaukee,” said Settle. “It’s a hands-on museum. You can touch everything there. The museum has a giant aquarium with a touch tank where you can touch sting rays and other freshwater fish.”
The museum’s Reiman Aquarium allows visitors to journey from the Great Lakes to the Caribbean with 10 tanks that represent the changes in underwater life one would encounter along the way. Other exhibits in the museum focus on the Great Lakes’ water system, with one station set up to allow guests to control the weather of a replicated hydrologic cycle.
A digital theater, learning laboratories and live theater highlight different themes, yet all come back to the process of innovation. Groups can decide if they would rather play guitar next to a virtual Les Paul, examine microscopic organisms, create a design project or attend one of the museum’s many customized classes and workshops.
