Milwaukeeans might remember a charming — or creepy — spectacle, depending on your point of view, that appeared at the Grand Avenue Mall each holiday season.
It was an orchestra, made up of 18 animatronic bears — about four feet tall and dressed in suits and gowns. Most had instruments in their paws. If you don’t know what an animatronic is — remember Chuck E. Cheese? Yeah, that.
The orchestra’s conductor was a mustachioed robotic bruin named Leonard Bearstein, a nod to American composer Leonard Bernstein.
The Leonard Bearstein Symphony Orchestra performed an automated 45-minute concert every hour, with hits like Santa Baby and Deck The Halls. Between each song, Leonard would sing the praises of his musicians, and occasionally banter with the three singers, named Ella, Bubbles and Bentley.
Justin Kern worked in the Grand Avenue Mall in the 2010s. He remembers the furry carolers, with their slowly blinking eyes and jerking movements.
"It was in this kind of strange overlap of kind of cool and technologically interesting, but also immediately outdated," Kern recalls. "There was some relentless charm that well into the 2000s, these bears were still down in the mall."
Kern, a freelance writer, wrote a tongue-in-cheek review of the Leonard Bearstein Orchestra for the Milwaukee Record in 2015.
But the bear orchestra was really meant for children. Dean Busalacchi, 24, remembers going to the mall as a kid every winter. His family paired it with the downtown Christmas parade.
"I always was put in a trance with the bears playing," he remembers. "It was one of those things that symbolized Christmastime in Milwaukee."
Fast forward to 2018, Christmas came around, and the bears weren’t there. A Bubbler Talk listener asked us to find out why.
An effort to revive struggling malls
But first, the bears' origin story. I called Todd Alexander, co-owner of a wedding DJ company in Charlotte, North Carolina. Alexander was the right-hand-man of Paul Lawrence, who created the bears.
"Paul Lawrence was a marketing guru so to speak, back in the '70s and '80s," Alexander says. "He worked for a company called Faison and Associates. They built [and managed] malls up and down the east coast."
Alexander says Lawrence was always dreaming up ways to draw people to malls. He had created an animatronic bear quartet, why not an orchestra?
Ten sets of the Leonard Bearstein Orchestra were built and placed in malls including the Grand Avenue in the early 2000s.
"The reason the bears were in Milwaukee was because we got the management contract way back when, to try to bring Grand Avenue back to its glory days," says Alexander. "Unfortunately, I think the mall was too far gone at that point."
The Grand Avenue, like many shopping malls, suffered a grizzly fate. Traffic declined, stores shut down, even the mall Santas disappeared.
The mall changed ownership, and Alexander says the new owners have kept the bears in storage.
The Grand Avenue was redeveloped recently. The building where the bears used to roam is now a hip eatery called the 3rd Street Market Hall.
I reached out to Market Hall owner Omar Shaikh, and he confirmed that the Milwaukee set of the Leonard Bearstein Orchestra is still in storage. He said, there are no plans for the bears at this point.
Justin Kern, who used to work at the Grand Avenue, wonders if the bears will ever emerge from their hibernation.
"Milwaukee feels like just the kind of place that has this mix of hometown pride and appreciation for nostalgia," Kern says. "You could easily see Milwaukee being the place where the bears get their chance of revival — their comeback tour of sorts. "
Todd Alexander wants the bears to return to Milwaukee too. He says, if there’s an interested venue, he has an extra set of the Leonard Bearstein Orchestra that he could bring here, maybe even in time for this holiday season.
It doesn’t hurt to hope for a Christmas miracle.
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