Beneath the facades of the buildings around us is the history of people who built them.
Joshua Lipnik is an architectural photographer who has built a fanbase of his photos, and the history he researches to learn about the culture, economy and immigration that shaped the towns and cities of the Midwest since the late 19th century.
Lipnik curates the account Midwest Modern on X. After a recent road trip, Lipnik talked with Michigan Public's Tyler Scott about what he learned about the cultural legacy that shaped the architectural stylings of U.P. towns.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
T.S.: Were there particular buildings in the U.P. you knew you wanted to check out?
J.L.: Yes, there definitely were some buildings that I thought were significant. A lot of things related to mining up there. To me, that's kind of the most unique and interesting thing about the history of the Upper Peninsula and, you know, a huge part of the culture up there and the history. So getting to see a lot of the old mining architecture, and even the the mining towns, you know, stuff that wasn't directly part of the mining, but just the wealth that it created you can see in all these little towns all over the Upper Peninsula.
T.S.: You've posted from all across the Midwest. How is the U.P. different from other places?
J.L.: So, the way I think about the architectural culture of different places, I think there's sort of three main factors: natural resources, industry — so in the U.P., obviously mining and, and timber forestry were sort of the big industries. And then the third one would be immigration. And specifically in the period from the late 1800s to about the 1920s when most of the American cities were built. So in the Upper Peninsula for natural resources, you have the red sandstone around Lake Superior. And you see that in buildings all over the Upper Peninsula and across into northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota. And that's a really unique feature of the region that you really don't see as much in the lower part of Michigan or other parts of the Midwest.
The last piece, immigration in the Upper Peninsula, the largest group was Finns came from Finland and Sweden. And so they brought with [them] an extensive knowledge of log and timber construction. Lots of people have wood saunas and little log cabins and that type of thing. You also had large amounts of Italian immigration to the iron mining regions. And Italians were had a long history working with stone and brick. So you have some really fantastic stone and brick buildings in that area.
T.S.: What were some of the more interesting things you saw?
J.L.: One building I really loved up there, and people can look this up, was the Richter Brewery in Escanaba. So that's another one where it tells you a lot. It tells you that there is a large German population there. It tells you that at one point it was a big enough city that it could support its own brewery. And it's just a really interesting building from that era. It's kind of hard to talk about something that visual, but I would encourage people to look it up. As far as cities, I really loved Houghton and Hancock and sort of the Keweenaw Peninsula in general. Those two cities in particular felt almost like little European towns to me, where they're in this just beautiful natural setting in the hills up there. You have the huge river running between the two cities. Even if you aren't interested in architecture, every drive you go on up there — it's just a beautiful, beautiful place.
Joshua Lipnik runs the X account Midwest Modern.
