Milwaukee’s City Slogan Is… What?

Downtown Milwaukee. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

What is Milwaukee’s city slogan? I checked with the Urban Milwaukee staff and various other folks and met with silence and quizzical gazes.

Posing the question online, an AI overview told me “A recent tourism slogan for Milwaukee, introduced in 2024, is ‘Milwaukee: A Great Place on a Great Lake,’”

Wow, is that bot behind the times. A Great Place on a Great Lake was actually introduced nearly half a century ago and was replaced three decades ago by “Genuine American,” which never really caught on. In more recent years former Mayor Tom Barrett liked to call Milwaukee the “Fresh Coast City” but that never quite stuck. Nor, ultimately, did Barrett, though he has returned after four years in Luxembourg, whose slogan, by the way is “We want to stay what we are.” Oh, those stubborn Luxembourgians.

As for Milwaukee, not much has caught fire slogan-wise in recent years. I think we can be pretty certain there’s been no official slogan offered or we’d have seen a column by Matt Wild heaping ridicule on what it might have been with all 145 pounds of his actual weight. Even a short-lived Visit Milwaukee ad back in 2014 with the tagline “You gotta be here” was buried in Wild-ish waspishness for its “deep, overwhelming corniness” and “hilariously vague boasts.”

In truth, its not easy to coin these slogans, as Milwaukee’s poorly minted attempts of the past attest. In its early days Milwaukee was known as the Cream City, referring to its famous, lightly colored bricks, but perhaps the first official city slogan was the dim bulb “Milwaukee: A Bright Spot,” beginning in the early 1900s and used on-and-off at least through the 1930s,” according to writer Matthew Prigge.

Still, that was probably better that The Milwaukee Journal’s suggestion in 1918 that the city adapt “Milwaukee: A City for Children” as its motto or the Milwaukee Association of Commerce idea in the 1920s asking city business leaders use the phrase “Making Milwaukee Mightier.” After that came a long dry spell in the beer-soaked city until the 1960’s when a “short-lived mid-1960s slogan attempt was ‘Milwaukee is Great for Living and Growing Greater’” (zzzz) followed by an even longer one pushed by the Convention and Visitors Bureau: “World of Fun, Old World Charm, New World Vigor” (three worlds in one!) as a mini-history of these attempts by the Milwaukee Public library recounted.

No, none of those tag lines stuck for very long. In the early 1970s Mayor Henry Maier came up with “Milwaukee: Talk it Up!” It appeared on numerous city publications and in print and TV ads, with Maier calling the slogan “an antitoxin against negativism and apathy,” though Hank himself was known for quite a bit of negativity towards various enemies.

Later in the ‘70s came a “Milwaukee – The Well Kept Secret” promotional campaign and film, and in the early 1980s, “Milwaukee Builds Winners,” perhaps a sequel to Making Milwaukee Mightier?

Around that time the convention bureau had a contest to create a slogan which attracted thousands of entries: with the winning entry by graphic designer Jack White — a founder and past president of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design — who submitted “Milwaukee: A Great Place on a Great Lake.” That lasted longer than most of the slogans and still gets mentioned though the convention bureau replaced it with “Milwaukee: Genuine American” in 1995, which faded away in less than a decade.

Across the nation you can see legions of risible city slogans. Houston once called itself “The Golden Buckle of the Sunbelt.” Dumas, Arizona is the “Home of the Ding Dong Daddy.” Nederland, Colorado is “Home of the Frozen Dead Guy.” Lovely.

Two cities in Wisconsin made it to a list of the 10 worst in America: Cuba City: “The City of Presidents” – “Huh? Not a single President is from here,” the writer noted. Also this winner from Mt. Horeb: “The Troll Capital.”

And for years Prairie du Chien went with “Where the eagle flies and the carp drop.”

All of which might help explain we we no longer have an official city slogan for Milwaukee. Because they so often fail. And because, I guess, our city is just too darn complex and fascinating to reduce to one mere slogan. And so the convention and visitors bureau, now called Visit Milwaukee, definitely a neater name, uses various slogans for various campaigns, its chief marketing director Joshua Albrecht tells Urban Milwaukee.

That includes the oldie but goodie “A Great Place on a Great Lake.” Other slogans include “Fresh City Vibes” for its meetings and convention advertising, “Your New Favorite City” in its new brand video and “City of Festivals” in recreational ads for the summer months with the sub message of “Gather. Celebrate. Repeat.,” which is definitely better than “Rinse and repeat.”

Finally there’s “Hand-Made. Home-Grown. World-Class” which may not trip lightly off the tongue, but “speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit of our amazing partner businesses,” Allbrecht explains.

Is there such a thing as too many taglines? Somewhere amid all the sloganeering, I’m guessing, is another potential column with many adjectives by Mr. Wild.