MILWAUKEE COUNTY HISTORICAL CENTER, AGAIN

Situated on the west side of the Milwaukee River, the Milwaukee County Historical Center was built in 1913 as a bank.  The building was briefly featured as a bank in the 2009 movie, Public Enemies, that starred Johnny Depp as John Dillinger.  I had done a post on this building once before and decided to return to see if there was anything new.  Not much.

The building is roughly triangular, consisting of a main floor and a broad perimeter walkway on a second floor.  Here is a shot looking at the first floor reception area that provides a good idea of the overall plan and features of this modest-sized building.

Probably the building's best feature is its ornate ceiling, visible in the above shot and shown in more detail in the following shots.

This latter shot illustrates the architectural challenges in designing a building that is triangular rather than rectilinear in shape.

Following is a close-up of one of the rectangular ceiling panels.  To avoid issues with lining up the sides of the panel within the limits of my camera's sensor, I took this shot on an angle.  That worked.

The building also features distinctive wrought iron railings on both the stairways and balcony areas that I also wanted to capture.  I played around with the following shot, experimenting with various apertures, with the thought of keeping the railing sharp and letting the background go out of focus.

This was actually shot at f/22 (with an exposure of 5 seconds).  Even so, the background is quite out of focus because of how close I was to the railing.  (Recall that the closer the focus, the more rapidly the background falls out of focus.)

John