Took this photo on the drive home from work tonight. I believe this building was once a theater and suffered fire damage at one point, and now a nonprofit is redeveloping it and its neighbors on the block.

Actually, I just looked it up. The structure was originally built as a 1000-seat movie theater in 1915, and it lived through many incarnations, including a music club that booked some very big acts in the 1980s, before falling on hard times, becoming vacant, and finally suffering a fire several years ago. Here’s a link to the story about it in Urban Milwaukee:

(Aside: Milwaukee had an amazing music scene when I first moved here in the early 1980s, so it shouldn’t have surprised me to see that U2 and the Police played this club back then. But the passage of time mutes memories and pushes them into the dark corners until something like this pulls them back into the light. Funny, and also kind of sad, how that works.)

(Further aside: I guess the “dark corners” and “light“ references sort of fit the aesthetic of this photo, as well. It was dark during the drive home tonight, but thanks to the magic of the iPhone camera, I was able to get a pretty bright picture of the mural and colorful boards, even so!😀)