A new field guide goes back to the basics — a walk in the park. Milwaukee sisters Karen and Jennifer Lemke explored more than 50 of the city’s parks to find accessible walks and paddles, noting features like their accessibility, trail surfaces, bathroom access and whether they’re easy to get to using public transit. They spent five months scoping out parks together.
With their book, Easy Walks and Paddles in Milwaukee, the sisters hope to serve people with mobility issues or visual impairments, as well as elders and parents with young kids. It’s also a showcase of the city that they know and love.
The idea was coined by Marjorie Turner Hollman, a writer in Bellingham, Massachusetts, who edits the “Easy Walk” series. According to Hollman, there are a few things that make a walk an “easy walk.”
“Not too many roots or rocks, relatively level, with firm footing,” Hollman says. “And something of interest along the way — water views, cool rocks. Has nothing to do with distance because that’s individual stamina. For any of us, like me, who [have] mobility challenges, trail surfaces make the difference whether you can access an area or not.”
Thirty years ago, Hollman had a life-saving brain surgery that left her paralyzed on her right side. Easy walks became the foundation of her recovery journey; almost daily for seven years, she walked with friends or family along a dead-end road near her home, which overlooked a lake. For Hollman, who later wrote about her walking practice in My Liturgy of Easy Walks, walking wasn’t just about physical health. It was a meditation on the world around her and what it means to be able to move.
Hollman and Karen Lemke met online, in a Zoom meeting last year. Hollman had been wanting to add an urban field guide to the series — until now, most of the books have been focused on Massachusetts, where she lives.
I went on a walk with the Lemke sisters in Bay View’s Humboldt Park, one of the many parks they visited as they put their field guide together. You can find a map of the parks they visited here.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What has the easy walk come to mean to you after putting this guide together?
Jennifer: I feel like it's kind of synonymous with disability rights and the importance of thinking about all ability levels and all needs when designing public infrastructure, like parks.
All the walks that you two found are accessible by public transit. Why was that such a big priority for putting this together?
Jennifer: My spouse and I decided to go down to one car maybe seven, eight years ago, so that's just how I think and plan about getting things done. So when Karen and I started doing this project, it was like, well, that's how I'm gonna get to these parks. I'm not gonna take our car when she's at work. And that's not unique. There's tons of people in the city and outside of the city who are navigating without a car. So why wouldn't we focus on what's accessible to everybody?
Karen: We've also considered how public transit is part of a just transition climate solution. The more we can normalize everyone using public transit … to me, the transit system in Milwaukee is one of our greatest assets. Being able to get around without having to have your own car is part of what the future looks like.
You mentioned, Karen, that you would choose a new park to go to weekly, and take notes in your phones. Just tell me about the process of putting this together.
Karen: So Jennifer and I started researching parks — ”researching” meaning going for a walk and then having a snack — researching parks in earnest in June and July. At first, I had printed out a bunch of pieces of paper for us to take notes on. Then I realized, if I could automate this somehow with our phones, that would make this a lot easier. So I made a Google form. And then we were able to do data entry, so to speak, which spit it all into a spreadsheet. Then, because it was already a data table, and it had the addresses in it, I was able to put that into Google Maps. And now we have an interactive map as well.
I love that you have suggested snacks for each spot because I'm very food-motivated. Where did that idea come from? That wasn’t part of Marjorie's initial vision, right?
Jennifer: We would go and hit up two or three parks in a row and then be like, “I'm starving, and we don't know this neighborhood. Where are we going to go now?” We're both kind of health-conscious people. I've been vegetarian for 14 years. So sometimes it's like, where am I gonna go? So we started [asking], "OK, if we're gonna go explore this neighborhood, where are we gonna eat? Who's got the vegetables?”
As you're putting this together, did you observe anything about where parks are in the city or whether some parks are easier to get to in some parts of the city than others? What were some of your observations?
Karen: For sure. Let me talk a little bit about Frederick Law Olmsted, who was the landscape architect who designed Central Park, and the three early parks in the Milwaukee system. He was very committed to accessibility. To him, it was also very important for people from all different social backgrounds, classes, ethnicities — he had visited the South, before the Civil War, and had written about the conditions that enslaved people were in. [He] really was part of the groundswell [that led to] the abolitionist movement in the 19th century.
So there's some of that history that underlies the patterns of our parks. There’s some — as the city built out — places that were intentionally marginalized, redlined, and through deed restrictions and other racialized ways of saying “these places are for us” and “these places aren't for you.” There are certainly places on the north and northwest side, and the south side, that have less access to parks. But in general, 90% of people in the City of Milwaukee have access to a park within one mile. The 10% who don't are in predominantly African American neighborhoods.
Did any work on this project change how you see walks in your life or see public parks in the city?
Jennifer: I feel more obligated to be more involved. I don't want to say politically, but like with the local government and preserving these parks. I think this project has really opened our eyes to just how much work has been put into building this thriving, comprehensive parks system. Yet, you can see in the more underserved neighborhoods, it's kind of starting to break down a bit. I just feel pressure to preserve what we've invested in. And not let it fall into disrepair to the point beyond repair, where people start saying, “Well, no, let's not give any money to the parks, look what they've let happen to that park.”
Karen: I've been thinking about colonialism and the structures of what's been built upon layers of civilizations. And how we erase — culturally [as] a function of whiteness — to just pretend that there was nothing in Milwaukee before Solomon Juneau got here. So I wanted to tell the story — no, there were amazing Native American villages here. A bunch of these diagonal roads, they are Native American walking paths that connected these ancient villages that predate Juneau by 200 years.
We are in a thriving, multi-ethnic city. I see that as such an asset. This is the city I want to live in. This is the kind of future that I want to build and work towards. If this book can be part of the conversation about accessibility, about recognizing that we need to make sure that our built environment is inclusive of everyone, everyone, everyone — I'd be overjoyed if our book could do that.
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