The Milwaukee Public Museum: Where the Diorama Was Invented

The Milwaukee Public Museum has been at the corner of North Eighth Street and West Wells Street since nineteen sixty-two, but its collections go back to eighteen fifty-one, when a group of naturalists in the city began accumulating specimens. The institution was formally chartered in eighteen eighty-two and opened to the public in eighteen eighty-four. It has been continuously operated since then.

What the Milwaukee Public Museum is known for, among people who study museum history, is the habitat diorama. The naturalist Carl Akeley, who worked at the museum in the eighteen nineties, developed the technique of placing taxidermied specimens in three-dimensional reconstructed environments that approximated their natural habitat. Instead of a stuffed bird on a stick in a glass case, visitors saw a bird in its marsh, surrounded by the plants and light of the place it actually lived. The Milwaukee Public Museum housed the world's first habitat diorama.

The Streets of Old Milwaukee, opened in nineteen sixty-five, extended the same principle into human history. It was one of the world's first walk-through streetscape dioramas, a reconstruction of nineteenth-century Milwaukee commercial streets that visitors could enter and move through. The sounds, the light, the smell of the recreated environment were all part of the design.

The current building will close on January third, two thousand twenty-seven, and the museum will move to a new purpose-built home in downtown Milwaukee, where it will reopen under the name Nature and Culture Museum of Wisconsin. The Streets of Old Milwaukee are scheduled to make the move with it.

If you are in Milwaukee before January of twenty twenty-seven, the current building is worth an afternoon.