Budweiser Tower, Manitowoc, WI

Making the RPPC of the "Bud Tower" November 8, 2009

If the Busch Malt Plant wasn't there, the view at the end of the main street into downtown Manitowoc would be Lake Michigan. A surreal oddity, the tower exuded the warm aroma of roasting barley and the roar of its machinery lent an industrial ambiance to downtown. A work of "hand painted pop", the giant bottle and two cans of Budweiser ("3 Buds short of a 6-pack" wrote Jeff Felshman in the Chicago Reader in 1992) depicted were so much a part of the landscape that the natives didn't see it. An oddity of the town, it appeared on postcards sold at drugstores and shops until recently when corporate shufflings and alcohol awareness made it perhaps too complex an image to stock at the Walgreens. Despite being covered with an updated vinyl photographic mural about a decade ago, it remains a Manitowoc icon obliterated in 2012 due to a City Ordinance according to an article in the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter published November 7, 2012. We made a photograph "Trish & Matt Downtown, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, 1995" to record life in its shadow.