Lisa Liljegren appreciates the details. She looks around and notices them. That’s what happened when she started working in downtown Milwaukee. She was spending time in the Plankinton Building at 161 W. Wisconsin Avenue, which used to be part of the Grand Avenue Mall.
Lisa noticed a four-leaf clover design repeated hundreds of times on the inside and outside of the building.
“It’s in the railings, it’s in the stone, it’s in — I think it’s called the cornerstones — where the elevators are, it is everywhere,” Lisa says. “And so I’m just curious, what’s behind it?”
To try to answer that question, we have to go back more than 100 years, when this building was called the Plankinton Arcade.
A grand shopping arcade
John Plankinton was a prominent Milwaukeean who made his fortune in meat packing…