Listen: Batting leadoff for the 2010 Neighborhood Project is Martin Drive, a compact but robust neighborhood nestled comfortably between Washington Park on the north, Highway 41 on the west, the Miller Valley on the south, and Highland Boulevard on the East. It's primarily residential with a few businesses (top quality businesses, by the way -- more on that later), so this week, we'll be meeting a number of neighbors who represent the gamut of folks who live in the neighborhood, from those with deep roots to those with newly planted seeds. I have to be honest with you -- I bike by the Martin Drive neighborhood at least twice a day, and I knew very little about it before we started this campaign. However, having immersed myself in everything Martin Drive for the past week, I'm practically fluent in their native language. And as an unofficial ambassador for the neighborhood, I personally invite you to explore Martin Drive with me this week. My first experience with the neighborhood was eating lunch at Birdie's sometime last summer and noticing their streetcar neighborhood sign as well as a remarkable string of apartment buildings on Martin Drive. I always felt like those buildings could have been dorms for an Ivy League campus -- so how'd they get in Milwaukee? And what about the streetcar? There had to be a story there: see podcast below.
By the way, referring to Pat Mueller as a "superstar of Martin Drive" is certainly an understatement. I went through a few revisions on that piece of copy -- I tried "doyenne," "queen bee," "foundation," "star," and "leading light."
And another introduction to the neighborhood -- Martin Drive resident Sharon Williams (who I'd previously crossed paths with during the 2009 Make Milwaukee campaign, as she's had long history with the wonderful Ko Thi Dance Company) stood on the corner of Highland and Martin Drive and talked about what we found in front of us:
Interested in Martin Drive? You can learn more about them at their neighborhood website, and of course, you can always go and check it out for yourself. Produced by: Adam Carr