The Bicycle Messenger on Location

Dog-sitting and old haunts

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Jul 18, 2025

The Neptune Gate at Milwaukee’s Villa Terrace

A very dear friend asked me to dog-sit while she helped her daughter move to a new city post-graduation. Archie is an intelligent poodle/Australian shepherd mix with one blue eye and one brown, and he goes into raptures whenever we haven’t seen each other in a while—as in, when I get up in the morning, or when I return to the house after going outside for a few minutes. Archie loves to ride in the car, so after he’d snoozed at my feet while I worked at my laptop, I took him down to the shores of Lake Michigan to visit one of my favorite East Side landmarks.

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There’s an eerie moment in The Bicycle Messenger when Steven and his girlfriend Megan pause outside this magnificent wrought-iron gate to gaze up at a renaissance-style villa perched high on a bluff overlooking Milwaukee’s lakefront. It’s 1992, and the villa’s grounds are neglected; the terraced gardens won’t be restored for another few years. But Steven reports an impossible, visceral memory of having been to the place as a child.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Some great man’s house?”

“It used to be. It’s called Villa Terrace.”

Megan stared up at it. The place reminded her of an opera house, its art deco gate like the cage of an old-fashioned elevator.

“I came here for a concert once,” he said. “Inside the courtyard.”

“You did? What kind of concert?”

“A string quartet maybe? I don’t really remember. It was a long time ago.”

Megan nodded, peering in at the empty fountain. At the top of the gate, Steven said, was a figure of Neptune in bas relief, but he faced the inside, so all you could see from the back was a scalloped seashell. Megan noticed the prongs of his trident extending beyond the semicircular top of the gate, like the oversized minute hand on a cartoon clock—pointing, as it were, to a fateful hour about to strike. She put the strange thought aside.

“The garden was lovely back then—not like it is now,” Steven went on. “There was a water staircase right there in the middle—”

“A water staircase?”

“A waterfall going down those steps, yeah. And the hedges were all sculpted, and it was full of flowers.”

The water staircase in operation

It’s funny how places look different when you haven’t visited them for a long while. My imagination had rearranged this garden somewhat, bringing the fountain with its spouting bronze fish much further forward toward the gate; it quietly resumed its true spot as I paused with Archie to watch a newly married couple wander the garden near the cascading water staircase. According to the placard outside the main entrance, their names were Ulysses and Joanne. Congratulations, you two!

There’s a grand winding road leading up the bluff; and while I’m in my fifties, I’m currently in better shape than fictional nineteen-year-old Megan, who struggled to match Steven’s long-legged pace on that day. I’ll admit, I took some satisfaction in that. As Archie and I approached the top of the hill, a young couple drove past on a motorcycle. The girl on the back held her slim, tanned arms down at her sides; she wore the man’s helmet, while he was bareheaded. To my right, a young man appeared to rise out of the ground: he’d just hiked straight up the bluff on a well-worn path with a notice that said the hill was hazardous for sledding. It looked hazardous for pedestrians, too.

Archie and I turned left onto Terrace Avenue, where a man with a portable grill off the back of his pickup offered to sell us Usinger’s sausage and brats. Villa Terrace was closed to visitors for a private reception, but as Archie and I walked past the caterer’s van parked at the service entrance, I imagined Steven climbing out of a similar vehicle to serve canapes at a similar wedding. He and Megan felt as real to me in that moment as the man with the grill or the couple on the motorcycle.

The Nort Point Water Tower, completed in 1874

After visiting Villa Terrace, Megan and Steven would have waited for the bus right about here. It wasn’t until I read Blue Walls Falling Down by Joshua Hren that I learned there was a winding staircase inside this water tower. I’m not sure if visitors are still allowed to climb to the top; dogs most certainly would not be. Besides, Archie was getting tired.

One great thing about dogs—especially other people’s dogs—is that they ask no questions. Thanks for lending him to me, Nancy. We’ll be on our way to the airport to pick you up soon.