South entrance to Lake Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, circa 1910

About this postcard

The view looks across the south entrance of Lake Park in Milwaukee, where a stone bridge with a balustraded parapet and a sculpted lion spans a wooded ravine; an open touring car with a driver and passenger in light summer dress crosses the roadway, and a red-roofed pavilion with a small tower rises among the trees behind. Lake Park was laid out in the 1890s on a design by Frederick Law Olmsted, whose plan set aside the ravines and bluffs along the Lake Michigan shore as pleasure drives and footpaths. The bridge and ornamental lamps shown here carried early automobile traffic into the park in the first decades of the twentieth century.