48 SPRING 2019
TRAVEL INSIDER
Surf City, Wisconsin
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Sheboygan. What a delightful word to say.
It almost encourages exaggerated pronunciation,
especially when spoken with the rounded
consonants and dragged-out vowels of many
Wisconsinites. It’s a small city, hovering around
50,000 in number, and has been historically known
as the “Bratwurst Capital of the World,” as well as
home to the world’s largest American flag. On an
old postcard, it boasts “Cheese, Chairs, Churches,
and Children,” but in recent years, it’s also on the
precipice of becoming, at the very least, a splendid
place to see some fantastic art, new and old.A few journalists and I were given the chance
to visit the John Michael Kohler Arts Center for
two days, which seemed more than enough,
considering my metropolitan mindset and
distaste for cold Winters (my San Francisco
relocation was deliberate...) What I found,
however, was that I could have stayed for
weeks, meandering around this unfamiliar yet
deeply welcoming landscape, investigating the
fascinating history of this moderately-sized city
that lies between Milwaukee and Green Bay.Visiting Sheboygan in the winter is tough, as
most Wisconsinites have entered what my
shuttle bus companions referred to as, without
humor or hesitance, “hibernation.” And that is
not to say they can’t handle the cold. Wisconsin
regularly dips below zero in the winter, and
I imagine it probably has something to do with
the fact that my fingers felt like they were
going to break off after a three-block, gloveless
journey with my (rather tasty) gas station
coffee. This is coming from a Maine-native,
given to regularly chastising Californians’
tendency to whine when the temperature drops
below 50. The coldest temperature recorded in
Wisconsin is -55 degrees.... Anyway, everywhere
I went indoors was warm and the locals’
temperament even warmer.The first night there, a freelancer and I were
brought to the Duke of Devon, a British pub that
lies on the north shore of the town’s namesake
Sheboygan river. We all got burgers, which,
coming from San Francisco, was notable, what
with more vegans joining ranks with every
passing year. Each burger boasted a different type
of cheese, which is notable for much more obvious
reasons. Wisconsin is as enthusiastic about
cheese as the Milwaukee airport might make you
believe, and it certainly made me believe, I came
back with three cheese pins for the office and a
plush Holstein cow... But yes, the Duke of Devon,
tasty burgers, lots to look at. If you can think of
a famous Briton, I bet there’s a photo of them
somewhere in that restaurant.The next morning, we entered Paradigm Coffee,
a café reminiscent of time spent in Western
Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, a small semi-rural
region with an overwhelming number of college
students and arguably too many slam poets.
This was the real deal though, the rustic interior
crafted almost entirely out of wooden doors.
Perhaps another industry once called Sheboygan
home, and maybe it still does? In addition to
some truly remarkable coffee, they had all sorts
of memorabilia, from hand carved Wisconsin
keychains to bottle openers crafted from old
stove parts. Unlike a coffee shop one might find inAll Photos by Eben Benson Above: Stephanie H Weill Center For The Performing Arts