Original article by Paula Burkes for NewsOK

Holland native Martin van der Laan welcomes ‘custodial’ challenge of historic Skirvin Hilton Hotel in Oklahoma City.

As a 30-year hotelier with six years on luxury cruise ships, Martin van der Laan has had some amazing experiences. His career has taken him from Buenos Aires to St. Petersburg, from Iceland to Venice, the Caribbean to Alaska and beyond. He lived and worked five years on Grand Cayman island and was based another five in sunny Boca Raton, Fla.

But when van der Laan and wife, as empty-nesters, had the opportunity to move to Oklahoma City from Florida in February 2011 for him to manage the Skirvin Hilton Hotel for Milwaukee, Wis.-based Marcus Hotels and Resorts, it “was a no-brainer,” van der Laan said.

The industry veteran said he embraces the history of the hotel, likes and respects the community that saved it — after being shuttered for 17 years — and considers it a privilege to serve as the hotel’s “custodian,” along with a staff of 160.

Van der Laan, 50, recently sat down with The Oklahoman to talk about his professional and personal life. This is an edited transcript:

Q: Can you tell us about your roots?

A: My hometown is Hengelo, Holland, a city of about 80,000, 20 miles from the German border. Three of our five TV stations were German ones, so speaking German, along with Dutch, came second nature to me. I started learning English at age 6 at the privately-funded public school I attended and where I played soccer and other sports, with students from Austria, England and elsewhere. People don’t know it, but Holland is a tremendous melting pot.

My brothers — three years older and five years younger — still live in Holland. Our parents are deceased. My father worked as an export manager for a German company that made scales and slicing machines for food stores. My mother worked for a foundation that helped integrate foreign workers into Dutch societies.

Q: How’d you decide on a career in the hotel and restaurant industry?

A: Originally, I planned to study geography and history, because they were subjects I loved. But at the last minute I decided to go to hotel school at Hanze College, some 100 kilometers from my hometown. From age 16, I’d worked as a disc jockey at clubs and restaurants, and my boss was the owner of multiple restaurants. So the industry is what I knew. I graduated third in my class.

Q: What was your first job after college?

A: I worked for a year for a small, family-owned hotel in Switzerland. The owner doubled as the executive chef and his wife, executive housekeeper and front-office manager. I was the maitre d’ for two restaurants. It was great hands-on experience. I lived in the hotel and every morning woke to a view of three mountaintops: the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau.

Q: How’d you meet your wife?

A: Some 26 years ago on a weeklong cruise from Cozumel to the Grand Caymans to Ocho Rios, Jamaica. She was a passenger from outside New York City, where she worked as a former claims consultant for Prudential. And I was two years into a stint as maitre d’ of the dining room on the ship, one of Carnival Cruise Lines’ first three super liners. My college dean referred me for the job, which I loved. But after I met my darling, I worked only one more year before we married and I moved to the states. Over that year, Diane and I kept in touch. I’d send letters and flowers, and at the Grand Cayman post office, would drop $100 for a phone line to talk to her for an hour.

I’d spend an occasional long weekend with her in New York, or she’d join me in Florida when I had a week off.

Q: What’s your favorite room in the 225-room Skirvin Hilton?

A: The 20 rotunda suites. They’re very unique. Each is one-bedroom and features an adjoining oversized living area, which is situated in the hotel’s rotundas.

Q: What are your proudest contributions to the Skirvin so far? What’s on tap?

A: I was proud to be a part of planning the hotel’s 100th anniversary celebration last year, and, versus one big gala, deciding on a series of public events — from a ’20s flapper night in the original ballroom to a ’70s disco night in the Red Piano Lounge. I think my proudest moment was when Dannie Bea Hightower — the daughter of the late Dan James, who ran the Skirvin in its glory days — said the celebration would’ve made her father very happy.

We’ve recently introduced an 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday brunch in the Park Avenue Grill, with guitarist Edgar Cruz as the entertainment. And in place of our former gift shop, we soon plan to open an art gallery. We’ve partnered with the Paseo Arts Association to introduce an artist-in-residence program, where we’ll every year give free studio space to one emerging artist. We’re constantly looking for better ways to not only serve our guests, but also our community.

Original article by the Oklahoma Gazette

September 10, 2012 | For HotelNewsNow.com by Stephanie Wharton | Original Article

The cost of hotel renovations is increasing at a time when brands are battening down on such improvement projects, leaving some owners struggling to scratch together financing.

As the required projects are pushed forward, hotel construction companies are noting, cost-saving trends enacted by hoteliers as they embark on renovation and construction work. While the costs for actual decorative items and building materials haven’t gone up or down, hoteliers are saving by going with standard pieces rather than premium items, said Warren Feldman, senior VP with Jonathan Nehmer + Associates, which released the “2012 Hotel Cost Estimating Guide” in July with HVS.

“Whereas in the past you might have been more driven to have a custom piece in your guestroom because you were trying to differentiate yourself in the market, right now you probably … want to pick up a stock item that isn’t as costly,” Feldman said.

For example, rather than choosing fabric of a premium color, he is finding more clients are picking up stock fabrics instead.

“Just little decisions like that. That’s where our clients are finding they save money,” Feldman said.

Michael Johnson, CEO of Satori Construction and Renovation, a contractor for construction services in the hospitality industry, said clients are more selective now than they were several years ago.

“We’re seeing a lot of, ‘What do I absolutely have to change?’” he said of how clients are approaching the renovation process.

“A lot of people are only doing the bare minimum. They’ll change out the carpet, but they’ll leave some fixtures. They’ll pick and choose,” Johnson said.

Kevin Gallagher, operations project manager for Marcus Hotels & Resorts, said the trend he has seen this year within the seven to 10 projects his company has completed is the high cost of shipping.

Sourcing is an important factor to consider when making product decisions, especially cased goods, Gallagher said.

Sometimes purchasing a product overseas can be less expensive, but the shipping can be incredibly costly, he said.

Gallagher recommends looking more into domestic products. “Although the product itself may be more expensive, it is often offset by that cost of shipping.”

Another important cost-saving factor to consider is product durability, he said.

For example, using porcelain rather than real stone or wood has worked out well in Marcus Hotels & Resorts properties. Not only is the product less expensive, it lasts longer if it is in a high-traffic area of the hotel, Gallagher said.

Labor costs down

A cost that has gone down is the price of labor, sources interviewed for this report said.

“We saw small decreases in some of the more labor-intensive things because labor costs are actually down,” Feldman said. “With the economy, there are more people fighting for work, so they are less apt to get you with hard pricing.”

Hard vinyl installation jobs and painting have gone down because the price that is charged for those jobs has gone down. “It’s not actually a good thing,” Feldman said.

With so many people having difficulties obtaining work, what Johnson is finding is many contractors who used to build hospitals and schools are trying to get into the hotel business as well to increase their workload.

“A lot of the larger hotel companies and project managers are finding that they are hiring people that are not getting the rooms done as fast they need to, and they are having to come back and repair things that weren’t done correctly in the first place. That ends up bumping up the price anyway,” Johnson said.

What hoteliers need to keep in mind is their product perishes every single night, he said. Delays because of mistakes in the renovation process can be compared to throwing that product away.

“A lot of people just look at the price that the contractor gives them. What they forget to take into account is the lost revenue they aren’t getting from those rooms … if they have to close them down again in two weeks,” Johnson said.

The trend David Roedel, business development team leader at Roedel Companies, is seeing is the tendency for clients to ask for more last-minute projects.

Trying to speed up the process is only more detrimental in the long run, Roedel said.

“I think when you try to compress the timeline … those are the times when you get into trouble,” he said. “That can include cost overruns and time overruns.”

Construction outlook

With hotel-specific contractors not as available these days, it seems like things are picking up in the construction space, Roedel said.

“There are a few companies that have held off as long as they felt comfortable,” Johnson said. But with announcements brands have made in the last few months, he thinks owners will be investing in bigger projects going into 2013.

During the past couple years, the majority of everyone’s work has been renovations, Feldman said. And the company’s yearly cost estimating guide, which has been published for four years now, has been based on that.

“What we are hearing from people now is if we can create something similar to this for new builds because there’s a lot of uncertainty right now of what it’s going to cost,” Feldman said.

The Hilton Milwaukee City Center is bringing back a swanky lounge from years past.

The hotel has started renovation of its Monarch Ballroom to turn it into the Monarch Lounge, an old-fashioned lobby lounge in art deco style, said Steve Magnuson, vice president and general manager at the Hilton.

A lobby lounge was part of the hotel when it opened in 1927 as The Schroeder Hotel at 509 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee. At some point the lounge closed, and the space was converted to the Monarch Ballroom.

The new lounge will have a “living room” feel, with a bar, seating areas, a “media center” and a stone and metal fireplace, Magnuson said. It will include floor-to-ceiling mahogany wood panels, leather chairs and original crystal chandeliers. The hotel also has taken down the walls facing the lobby and opened up 30-foot windows along the eastern wall, offering a new view of downtown.

“It makes a much more grand entrance into the hotel, more of a gathering place,” Magnuson said.

The Monarch, expected to open in August, will offer classic cocktails, wine by the glass and craft beers. The food will be small plates such as calamari, prosciutto bruschetta and chicken pot stickers. Live piano music will be offered every night.

The Monarch Lounge at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center will have a living room feel.

Original Article – JSOnline.com

Dressed up for a show downtown? An elegant new lounge might go with that outfit. 

New but old, actually. The Hilton Milwaukee City Center, 509 W. Wisconsin Ave., has reinstalled its second-floor Art Deco lobby cocktail lounge and reinvigorated the space.

While it still has the 1927 hotel’s original wrought-iron metalwork, trio of enormous crystal chandeliers and wooden paneling ringing the room under the 18-foot ceiling, the spacious lounge now has a contemporary fireplace at one end and a pair of flat-screen TVs at the other.

Between them is a full bar. In addition to cocktails, wine and beer, the Monarch serves small plates such as chicken potstickers and tuna crudo, and in the evenings, a pianist plays jazz.

Leather club chairs and other comfortable furniture in groupings are conducive to conversation — one pleasure of the lounge when I stopped in recently was that I could actually talk with a friend without having to shout. There also are communal tables and a work area for business guests, with iPads and printer.

A side benefit of the renovation: It exposed previously covered large windows on the hotel’s east side.

Sourcing products locally is an expectation these days, but when it comes to finding lobster and crabs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that’s not possible. So, Mark Weber, executive chef at Mason Street Grill in the Pfister Hotel, has decided to do the next best thing. Earlier this year, Weber embarked on his second stone crab-fishing excursion, and earlier this summer, he traveled to Maine to learn firsthand about lobster fishing. Surprisingly, Weber says seafood makes up about a third of the menu at Mason Street Grill, and as a result of his most recent trip it now includes items such as a lobster boil and a lobster salad with cilantro-honey-lime vinaigrette, avocado, oranges and fennel.

HOTELS spoke with Weber about his fishing adventures and his future plans for hands-on sourcing.

Mark Weber, executive chef, Mason Street Grill, the Pfister Hotel, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

HOTELS: Why embark on trips like your most recent lobster fishing adventure or your stone crab excursion earlier in the year? What do you see as the main benefits to your operation?

Mark Weber: The benefit is out of necessity for us. Being in the Midwest — I’m an East Coast guy myself — there’s a completely different attitude and acceptance level of seafood here. It stems to the suppliers as well. If I’m in New York at Daniel eating fish, he’s getting it from a completely different and better source.

A couple years ago, I ran my own restaurant. What I ended up doing was going down to Galveston, Texas, because a friend of mine moved down there and said they had great fish. So I went down there initially to set up a fish supply for my own restaurant, and it worked out really well. It gave me a different understanding of where my fish was coming from, the process of how it gets from water to boat to me and everything else.

A couple years ago, we started with stone crab here. I used to work in Miami Beach, and I love stone crab, and we have a hard time getting decent supply up here. I figure if we’re going to do stone crab, which is one of the owner’s favorite things to eat on the planet, we need to go down there and lock in a solid, steady, high-quality source. I thought it would be a good idea to — pardon the pun — dive right into stone crab fishing and see what it was all about. If I could understand it, then I could certainly bring the best possible product to my customer.

HOTELS: Describe the lobster fishing experience. What were some highlights, challenges or surprises?

Weber: It was very different than what I expected. Stone crab fishing is pretty straightforward, and I guess lobster fishing is pretty straightforward too. I guess what was surprising was the simplicity of it. I mean, you have a baited trap that’s in the water, the creature goes in there, and if you’re lucky enough to pull the trap up while he’s in there, you have yourself a nice lobster.

What I didn’t realize, especially in Maine, is there are a lot of different philosophies on lobster fishing. It seems like the older fishing families and the company we do business with, they’re more of a traditional fishing family. They tend to focus on hard-shell lobster. You’re looking for the heartiest lobster that thrive on the rocks and in the shallows. They tend to have big claws, and they’re associated with the highest-quality lobster you can get.

HOTELS: Was this the first time you had been lobster fishing?

Weber: Yes. It was fairly tricky. It’s not something you would want to venture out on your own and do as an amateur fisherman. When the tide is coming in or out, these little rogue waves come from out of nowhere and toss the boat. It’s very unnerving. You get tossed around pretty good even though you’re in shallow water, and there’s a certain amount of danger there. They’re really skilled boatsmen.

HOTELS: What was the main takeaway for you?

Weber: Understanding the source is the most important thing. The more you understand how it’s done and what you’re looking for and what the professionals know about it, you can tighten up your specs, and you can ensure you’re asking for something that makes sense, something they can deliver and something that truly is the highest-quality product. We really tightened our specs.

HOTELS: How are you marketing these types of expeditions to your guests? What has guest response been like?

Weber: We have some radio spots lined up. We’ve done a couple TV pieces on it. And we like to talk about it to the staff so they can talk about it to the customers.

It worked tremendously well with stone crabs. This year, we sold twice the amount of stone crabs in the first month than we sold the entire season the prior year. I’m kind of expecting the same thing with lobster. We still have to develop a bit more strategy of how we can effectively market this, but there are a ton of things we can do.

HOTELS: How much do you consider the cost/benefit equation for something like this? What is the main ROI?

Weber: It plays to our advantage in a lot of ways. I don’t know how measurable the ROI is, but I think it does a lot for us. Besides the fact that we can market it in the restaurant, it lends a lot of credibility to our name as a restaurant company and hotel company. I’ve been in this market for over 20 years. It’s hard to measure in dollars, but I think it does unspeakable things for our place in market. It’s tremendous.

HOTELS: Do you have similar plans for the future? What can we look for next?

Weber: I have another trip in the works right now. We’ve been partnered up with Meats by Linz in Chicago for a couple years. They’ve done a very good job for us. One of the things we were always interested in doing is having our own line of Angus beef. For the past two years they’ve been working with some ranchers in Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin. There are about 10 of them, and they’re raising certified, 100% Angus cattle in a few different locations, and they’re just starting to get to the maturity point where they can slaughter them. So that’s really our next move is to begin to feature our own brand, basically, of all-natural organic beef. One of the biggest producers is in Darlington, Wisconsin. He’s going to be my next trip, sometime before Christmas. It will coincide with our winter menu change.

I feel very privileged and lucky to be in a situation where we can make these things happen. It’s great to bring this kind of information to the customer. We have a dining counter here, and it’s nice to walk up to people, and you can give them information that is untouchable.

For Reggie Baylor, it all started in kindergarten at Milwaukee’s Siloah Lutheran School. It was there that his teacher, Mrs. Arnt, encouraged his passion for art. “She recognized how intense I was,” Baylor recalls. “In fact, she called my mother about a finger painting I did. My mother still has that painting.”

Today, Baylor is one of Milwaukee’s most successful artists. He was the first artist-in-residence at the Pfister Hotel. He has his own studio nestled into the Historic Third Ward, a second business, Plaid Tuba Holdings LLC, a brand designed to work with upcoming creative professionals, and an assistant, Heidi Witz, who helps him with both endeavors.

Baylor grew up in the city, at 41st and Hampton, and attended Lutheran parochial schools, where his artwork was encouraged. He also credits his parents for supporting his passion and forcing him to work at a young age (though he didn’t appreciate this at the time). “I am a by-product of my parents, who really forced a work ethic into my head,” he says. But his journey to success took some unexpected twists and turns.

When Baylor was in sixth grade, his family moved to Mequon, where he attended public schools and graduated from Homestead High School. At UW-Oshkosh, he majored in sculpture, but also took a lot of philosophy.

“I found connections between philosophy thinking and aesthetic thinking,” he says. “There are infinite ways to express myself and my ideas. Thinking of it numerically, all I have to do is pick one number and focus on it.” Baylor says he still has an obsession with philosophy, linear theory numbers, variables, and equations.

Baylor left college in 1988 just three credits short of graduating, hung around Oshkosh for a few years, then gravitated to California, where he met his wife Jill and worked at the Laguna Beach Art Museum and Newport Art Museum, helping to install exhibits. There, as Milwaukee Journal Sentinel critic Mary Louis Schmacher has written, “he opened crates and handled the works of Pablo Picasso, Ellsworth Kelly, Kiki Smith and — his favorite — the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, among countless others. Today, in Baylor’s Third Ward studio, there is an old cardboard box filled with beloved photographs, clippings and reproductions of artworks… Many of them date to the five years he spent studying art history in this hands-on way.”

The experience was critical to Baylor’s own artistry, and he moved from sculpture to painting in acrylics. In 1995, he connected to an art dealer, Suzanne Zada of Beverly Hills, CA , who began to represent him and still does today.

That same year Reginald, his wife and two sons moved to Chicago, Ill., where he worked as an owner operator for Mason Dixon Trucking. Meanwhile, he was working on his paintings. Upon moving with his family back to Milwaukee in 1998, Baylor began exhibiting widely in galleries and museums, and was able to become a full-time artist.

In 2009, Baylor served as artist-in-residence at the Pfister Hotel, where he had the opportunity to enjoy the impressive period architecture and extensive Victorian art collection of the Pfister.  Elements from the painting A Captive, he told the Shepherd Express, led him to incorporate putti, or winged angels, and Corinthian columns into new compositions. The residency also gave Baylor a chance to learn more about the business side of being an artist such as marketing and planning.

On a recent tour of Baylor’s studio, the buzz of creativity was immediate. Designed to be an open studio, Baylor and his staff welcome the community inside to get a flavor of his art. His pieces are eclectic, but often vibrantly-colored, with a pop art flavor. Some works include pop culture figures — the Kool-Aid Man, Pac-Man, even Mickey Mouse. Baylor has two sons,  now 16 and 21, and says that, “Living with Disney, Nickelodeon, and all these other youthful media, I sort of pulled that out and put it into my work. Things like that remind me of being young and innocent. There’s also an element of nostalgia. “ Not all of his works are so light-hearted, though. As Baylor notes, some of the pop culture figures represent darker themes.

His obsession with philosophy and equations can be seen in pieces like “Multiple Choice,” that graphically maps out equations, and “Instructions for a Cell Phone App” that is literally instructions for an app that enthusiasts can purchase. When asked about these pieces Baylor explains, “I’ve established a certain amount of rules, and those rules allow me to maintain a consistency in my aesthetics.” But there’s also a sense of exploration at work.  “Those pieces also were sort of a byproduct of finding ways to do things other than painting on canvas,” Baylor says. “I could use other ways and other technology to create work.”

Though people often comment on the colorfulness of his pieces, Baylor says he doesn’t feel that colors are the strongest part of his work. Instead, he considers his unique approach and process the vital aspect of his art. “It’s the lines and how I do the colors, how I approach a painting. I look at it numerically.”

Baylor also considers the demographics of his buyers so he can produce art in forms that are accessible to everyone. He sells large-scale pieces for the avid art enthusiast but also markets to the lower-income buyer with smaller items like postcards and posters. In the future he hopes to broaden his stock to include temporary tattoos, decks of cards and even jewelry.

Through Plaid Tuba Holdings, Baylor also helps mentor and develop young artists. When he thinks back to his own journey, he understands the importance of such encouragement. Still, the process of becoming an artist also depends on that person’s daring and tenacity. When asked to sum up his success story, Baylor laughs and says, “I got thrown in the water and had to learn to swim.”

Patrons listen to a reading, above, at Boswell’s Book Co. in Milwaukee

For 82 years, the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops were Milwaukee’s literary icons, “the books version of Miller or Pabst,” as one person put it. When the company closed its four remaining stores in late March 2009, devastating the city’s literary community, two of its managers opened new bookstores at two of the Schwartz locations: Boswell’s Book Co. (named after the Schwartz logo of 18thcentury diarist and author James Boswell holding a book) at the old flagship on Downer Avenue and Next Chapter in the suburb of Mequon.

Today, Milwaukee remains better known for its beer than its books. But Boswell’s and Next Chapter, as well as Books&Company in the suburb of Oconomowoc and the nonprofit arts organizationWoodland Pattern, lead a vibrant literary scene that uses the city’s proximity to Chicago to pull in big-name authors while distinguishing Milwaukee as an innovative bookish hot spot in its own right.

“You get good people because you make good events because you get media help, ” said Boswell’s effervescent owner Daniel Goldin. One cool summer evening, Goldin was buzzing around his bookstore, an 8,000-square-foot shop mingling new and used books in a college neighborhood called the East Side. About 100 customers settled into overstuffed leather couches and folding chairs.

They were there to see author Alexandra Fuller, whose 2011 memoir “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness,” a follow-up to the award-winning “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,”plunges into her British mother’s upbringing in Kenya and her own in war-torn Central Africa.

Mitch Teich, executive producer and co-host of “Lake Effect,” the local weekday magazine program on the NPR affiliateWUWM,was interviewing Fuller before the rapt audience, who shook with laughter at her wickedly funny anecdotes about her “racist, alcoholic mother” and “illiterate sister.”

As the conversation concluded, Goldin delivered a charmingly brazen challenge: He had to report back to the publisher the next day, and sales were mediocre, so if customers wanted more great authors like Fuller to come to town, they’d better buy more books. And so they did, lining up at the cash register and then at the signing table.

“I’m very committed to buying my books from here,” said AnnieMelchior, a yoga teacher in the dance department at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who was first in line. “It’s that commitment to bringing in authors and keeping the literary community fertile.”

The creativity and energy of Milwaukee’s independent bookstores have drawn admiration from some Chicago booksellers, who wonder if their northern neighbor has become a publishers’ favorite.

“It’s something we always talk about when we (booksellers) get together,” said StefanMoorehead, manager and buyer at Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood.“We talk about, what are we doing to improve our profile again?”

He said he was struck when RachelMaddow, on tour in April for her book “Drift,” bypassed Chicago and went to Milwaukee for a conversation hosted by Next Chapter.

“That got to us—like, wait a minute, what do we have to do here to get noticed?”Moorehead said. He believes Milwaukee’s appeal to publishers stems fromits booksellers’ efforts as well as the Milwaukee media’s promotion of the city’s book events.

Ask Milwaukee booksellers about that perception, and they balk. They consider themselves to be riding Chicago’s coattails, piggybacking on the big city’s stream of visiting authors by suggesting that as long as they’re in the area, they take the hour-and-a-half drive north to Milwaukee.

“I would aspire to do what (Chicago booksellers) do in terms of events,” said Next Chapter owner Lanora Haradon, who sold out 2,400 seats at theMaddowevent in the Riverside Theater in downtown Milwaukee. Penny Simon, the Crown publicist for “Drift,” said they picked Milwaukee because it was a “great event request”— a copy of the book was included in the ticket price, guaranteeing sales—and they didn’t get a comparable request from Chicago.

For publishers, the best-case scenario is for authors to hit both Chicago and Milwaukee in one Midwest stop to reach two distinct readerships, said Todd Doughty, director of publicity for Doubleday. “The Chicago and Milwaukee-area booksellers are some of the smartest and best-read in the country,” said Doughty, so visiting both is “a win-win for the publisher and author.”

Lisa Baudoin, co-owner of Books&Company, founded 29 years ago, said they all work hard to promote the Chicago- Milwaukee connection. But sometimes she gets bigname authors Chicago doesn’t: Best-selling author Chris Bohjalian was there this month promoting “The Sandcastle Girls,” and KateMorton, British author of “The Forgotten Garden,” is scheduled for October.Morton has only six U.S. stops on her tour, and bothMequon and Oconomowoc are among them.

Patrons listen to a reading, above, at Boswell’s Book Co. in Milwaukee

For 82 years, the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops were Milwaukee’s literary icons, “the books version of Miller or Pabst,” as one person put it. When the company closed its four remaining stores in late March 2009, devastating the city’s literary community, two of its managers opened new bookstores at two of the Schwartz locations: Boswell’s Book Co. (named after the Schwartz logo of 18thcentury diarist and author James Boswell holding a book) at the old flagship on Downer Avenue and Next Chapter in the suburb of Mequon.

Today, Milwaukee remains better known for its beer than its books. But Boswell’s and Next Chapter, as well as Books&Company in the suburb of Oconomowoc and the nonprofit arts organizationWoodland Pattern, lead a vibrant literary scene that uses the city’s proximity to Chicago to pull in big-name authors while distinguishing Milwaukee as an innovative bookish hot spot in its own right.

“You get good people because you make good events because you get media help, ” said Boswell’s effervescent owner Daniel Goldin. One cool summer evening, Goldin was buzzing around his bookstore, an 8,000-square-foot shop mingling new and used books in a college neighborhood called the East Side. About 100 customers settled into overstuffed leather couches and folding chairs.

They were there to see author Alexandra Fuller, whose 2011 memoir “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness,” a follow-up to the award-winning “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,”plunges into her British mother’s upbringing in Kenya and her own in war-torn Central Africa.

Mitch Teich, executive producer and co-host of “Lake Effect,” the local weekday magazine program on the NPR affiliateWUWM,was interviewing Fuller before the rapt audience, who shook with laughter at her wickedly funny anecdotes about her “racist, alcoholic mother” and “illiterate sister.”

As the conversation concluded, Goldin delivered a charmingly brazen challenge: He had to report back to the publisher the next day, and sales were mediocre, so if customers wanted more great authors like Fuller to come to town, they’d better buy more books. And so they did, lining up at the cash register and then at the signing table.

“I’m very committed to buying my books from here,” said AnnieMelchior, a yoga teacher in the dance department at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who was first in line. “It’s that commitment to bringing in authors and keeping the literary community fertile.”

The creativity and energy of Milwaukee’s independent bookstores have drawn admiration from some Chicago booksellers, who wonder if their northern neighbor has become a publishers’ favorite.

“It’s something we always talk about when we (booksellers) get together,” said StefanMoorehead, manager and buyer at Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood.“We talk about, what are we doing to improve our profile again?”

He said he was struck when RachelMaddow, on tour in April for her book “Drift,” bypassed Chicago and went to Milwaukee for a conversation hosted by Next Chapter.

“That got to us—like, wait a minute, what do we have to do here to get noticed?”Moorehead said. He believes Milwaukee’s appeal to publishers stems fromits booksellers’ efforts as well as the Milwaukee media’s promotion of the city’s book events.

Ask Milwaukee booksellers about that perception, and they balk. They consider themselves to be riding Chicago’s coattails, piggybacking on the big city’s stream of visiting authors by suggesting that as long as they’re in the area, they take the hour-and-a-half drive north to Milwaukee.

“I would aspire to do what (Chicago booksellers) do in terms of events,” said Next Chapter owner Lanora Haradon, who sold out 2,400 seats at theMaddowevent in the Riverside Theater in downtown Milwaukee. Penny Simon, the Crown publicist for “Drift,” said they picked Milwaukee because it was a “great event request”— a copy of the book was included in the ticket price, guaranteeing sales—and they didn’t get a comparable request from Chicago.

For publishers, the best-case scenario is for authors to hit both Chicago and Milwaukee in one Midwest stop to reach two distinct readerships, said Todd Doughty, director of publicity for Doubleday. “The Chicago and Milwaukee-area booksellers are some of the smartest and best-read in the country,” said Doughty, so visiting both is “a win-win for the publisher and author.”

Lisa Baudoin, co-owner of Books&Company, founded 29 years ago, said they all work hard to promote the Chicago- Milwaukee connection. But sometimes she gets bigname authors Chicago doesn’t: Best-selling author Chris Bohjalian was there this month promoting “The Sandcastle Girls,” and KateMorton, British author of “The Forgotten Garden,” is scheduled for October.Morton has only six U.S. stops on her tour, and bothMequon and Oconomowoc are among them.

Patrons listen to a reading, above, at Boswell’s Book Co. in Milwaukee