Lake Park

In the 1890s, Milwaukee hired Frederick Law Olmsted, the most famous landscape architect in America, to design a system of parks worthy of a growing city. Lake Park was among the jewels of that effort, a place where Olmsted's philosophy, that a park should feel like a natural landscape gently improved for people, could work with the drama of the Lake Michigan bluffs.

The result is a park of curving paths, framed views, and carefully composed scenes that reveal themselves as you walk. Olmsted's designs aimed to give city dwellers a restorative escape into nature, and more than a century on, Lake Park still delivers exactly that, a rus in urbe retreat on the edge of the city.

Rising among the trees on the bluff is the North Point Lighthouse, a historic beacon that once guided ships along the Lake Michigan shore into Milwaukee's harbor. Restored and cared for, the lighthouse and its keeper's quarters now serve as a small museum, and in season visitors can climb the tower for a view over the lake and the treetops.

The bluff itself is the park's defining feature, a high wooded edge where the land falls away toward the water. Overlooks along the top offer long views across Lake Michigan, whose horizon can look as boundless as the sea, and paths and stairs lead down toward the shore for those who want to reach the water's edge.

Some of the park's most romantic corners are its ravines, deep wooded folds in the land crossed by graceful arched footbridges, some of them historic works of engineering in their own right. Walking these shaded paths, with the sound of the lake beyond the trees, it is easy to forget you are within a major city.

The park also holds a much older mark on the land: an effigy mound, one of the animal-shaped earthworks built by Native peoples of the effigy mound tradition long ago. This is the ancestral land of the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee, and the surviving mound is a reminder that people gathered and honored their dead on this bluff centuries before Olmsted ever set pen to paper.

Lake Park anchors Milwaukee's east side, a district of tree-lined streets, older mansions, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, long one of the city's most cherished neighborhoods. The park connects to a broader lakefront system of parks and trails that runs along the shore, so a visit can easily expand into a longer walk or ride.

For Milwaukeeans it is a beloved everyday place, for picnics, weddings, runs along the bluff, and quiet afternoons by the water, and for visitors it offers a beautiful, uncrowded counterpoint to the museums and breweries downtown. It is Olmsted's gift to the city, still doing exactly what he intended.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.