Hennemann's Cream City House

Read this wall like an old newspaper ad, because that is what it is painted as. Rooms to let. Sleeping rooms upstairs. Bakery in the basement. Home of the 5¢ pies. The flourished script across the middle names the establishment: Hennemann’s Cream City House.

The house behind the lettering

The mural honors one of Algoma’s gone hospitality businesses, a boarding house from the era when a small Lake Michigan port town needed beds for travelers, rail men, and seasonal workers, and when a nickel bought you a pie from the basement bakery. “Cream City” almost certainly nods to the cream-colored brick that built so much of eastern Wisconsin, the same brick this district’s surviving storefronts are made of.

Here the record runs thin. Beyond what the wall itself says, the Hennemann establishment is barely documented online; the 2018 Door County Pulse feature captions it simply as “honoring another business from days gone by.” If you know the Hennemann family story, or where the house stood, this register wants it.

Who painted it

The project leading artists were Dave and Susie Butler of Syracuse, Indiana, a husband-and-wife Walldog team, and the wall was sponsored by Isaksen Architects, LLC. The Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure lists it as entry D in the lettered mural key, sitting near the Ahnapee & Western Railway mural at the corner of 3rd and Steele, which makes this corner a two-mural stop.

The Walldog Wave

Over three days, June 21 to 23, 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs, the international guild of mural and sign painters who keep the old hand-lettering craft alive, painted ten murals on historic downtown Algoma buildings. The event was conceived through the Algoma Main Street Program’s preservation work and coordinated by local Walldog Dave Petri. This register documents every wall in the set.

If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

• Historic Algoma Walking Tour, Volume II (Algoma Main Street Program brochure; ed. Leon Raether)
• Door County Pulse: A Community’s Vision, the Murals of Algoma (2018)
• Greater Green Bay Mural Guide