The one thing I kept
Everything here comes from the face of this one machine: every knob, every lamp, every engraved label. The real thing, and the design it became.
Tone Burst
A note before we start
I kept exactly one thing from my grandpa’s shop when he passed away, and it’s this little machine. To be honest, I don’t even know what it is or what it was used for. I just know that as a kid I liked turning the knobs and flipping the switches because they actuated with such old-school mechanical force — a satisfying thunk-thunk with each movement — nothing like today’s machines. There’s a realness to it that attracted me.
Today it sits at eye level on one of my bookshelves, in a spot I pass 50 times a day. Sometimes I still give the switches a flip, and smile. I learned a lot from Grandpa, down at the shop on the occasional Saturday morning, sitting at his workbench while he showed me how to take apart a microphone and re-solder a broken connection.
I never did get into mechanical things; I was always living in the future . . . and I still am. But he and I were alike in one very big way: we both loved to learn about technology and use it to create something powerful, something so much bigger than the little bundle of chips and wires in our hands.
His shop sat on the corner of 1st and National in Milwaukee, where generations of our family worked and played and lived together in the cradle of this city. My shop lives in the cloud and touches every corner of the world at once. Different technology for different eras, but the same result, I hope: leaving the people and places we touch a little better for having been there.
I love you, Grandpa.
Thanks for everything.
— Nate
How these words are made
I’ve been writing for a living for 30 years. We’re in a new age now, and I spend my days exploring the line between what’s human and what’s AI.
So here’s the honest version: a lot of what you’ll read from me going forward is a close mix of my work and my words with AI’s — an AI trained on years of my writing and my public projects, with a memory that keeps evolving, learning from talking to me every day. Not every word here comes straight from my fingers on the keyboard (though most do). But none of them exist without me.
We live in fascinating times. I’m still asking questions about what it is to be a human in a world of bots, and a bot in a world of humans.
The story
A building on a corner in Walker’s Point that has kept one family business after another alive for over a hundred years.
Every Friday I walk a few blocks from my house to get soup.
The soup is good. That’s not why I go. The building the soup shop lives in was my grandfather’s first storefront — the first roof his business ever had that wasn’t the basement of his own house. So on Fridays I stand in line on a floor he used to sweep, in a room where he used to fix things, and I eat my soup, and nobody in there knows a thing about it.
I love that. Buildings keep secrets like this all over the city. This is a story about the biggest one my family got to be part of — the corner of 1st and National, where he moved the business when it outgrew that first little room, and where it stayed for the rest of his life. The corner belonged to the Meisenheimer family for generations. Philip came over from Germany as a child and became a firefighter.
Explore
Every room on both floors, drawn as an instrument panel and written up in its own words — the museum, the radio room, the courtyard, the Model Ts grandpa built by hand. Point at a room to light it up; open the ones that have a story.
Open the building plans →