Artworks inspired by this location

I was born and raised in De Pere, Wisconsin (also spelled DePere), and graduated from high school there. You'd think that after living there for 18 years I would have some good photos of the place, but I don't. When I was growing up there, De Pere was an autonomous little working-class town--a nice, safe piece of small-town paradise for a kid to grow up in. Nowadays it has kind of turned into an affluent suburb of Green Bay, home to that city's practicing doctors, lawyers, and Packer players. New, obscenely large homes have popped up by the hundreds in neighborhoods that used to be corn fields and dairy farms. The town has grown quite a bit in population, land area, and per capita income, though the central core of "old" De Pere's buildings and citizens still remains relatively intact. There's also been an attempt over the past decade to revitalize the "main street" area downtown by converting old factories and industrial land into condos, inns, and parks. These days De Pere tries to play up its image as a quaint, small Wisconsin town, in hopes of catching some of the tourist traffic on its way up to Door County.

De Pere is adjacent to Green Bay, a city of 100,000-some-odd people. If you are a football fan, this is the place to be. Go visit Lambeau Field and the Packer Hall of Fame. Other than that, there's not a lot to see and do here. Northeastern Wisconsin as a whole has a good quality of life for its residents, but not much to offer tourists or visitors. For those who think of Wisconsin as a natural paradise dotted with picturesque small towns, you would be disappointed. Green Bay is an industrial city, home to paper mills, meat packing plants, and dairy processing factories (and a lot of insurance corporations). There is a lot of beauty in the state of Wisconsin, but this ain't it.

OK, I take some of that back. There are some lovely natural sites that I visit when I'm in the area. The Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary is an excellent nature center that I have visited since I was an infant. Its lagoons are home to thousands of ducks and geese (see picture at left), and the occasional cranes, swans, and herons. Kids and adults alike can buy a bag of corn and hand-feed the birds. There is also a small zoo featuring animals of that bioregion (including timber wolves, a cougar, and some river otters), and a few miles of hiking trails that don't get too wild, but provide you with a peaceful walk in the woods. The NEW Zoo is a larger zoo with animals from all over the world (lions, penguins, moose, wallabies, etc.), housed in little natural habitat displays, which favor rustic wood railings over concrete and glass enclosures. It has a good collection of animals and a nice, pleasant atmosphere. Kids love it. The NEW Zoo is adjacent to the Brown County Reforestation Camp, which offers several miles of trails through forests of birch and pine, great for hiking or cross-country skiing. My favorite place to hike is the Barkhausen Waterfowl Preserve. There are about a dozen miles of trails through a varied landscape of marshes, ponds, fields, and forests, along the shores of the Green Bay. This is the best place for birdwatching in the area. The sightings go beyond the usual Canada Geese and Mallards to species like Green Heron, White-Crowned Sparrow, Northern Bobwhite, and Pied-Billed Woodpecker.

Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary

Barkhausen Waterfowl Preserve

If you want to look at art, the Green Bay area doesn't offer much. The Neville Public Museum occasionally has exhibits of art that are usually disappointing, although I have a very good permanent exhibition on local history. I think the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (aka UWGB) might have a decent gallery, but I'm not personally familiar with it.

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