Oak Creek is a suburb of Milwaukee, a township since the 1800s that incorporated as a city in 1955 to avoid getting gobbled up by Milwaukee's city limits. The city has always been a pleasant place to live and grow up, scattered groups of subdivisions and businesses with farms and wide-open spaces in between.
The shuttering of a longtime Delco electronics plant along Howell Avenue proved to be a big catalyst for Oak Creek's recent reinvention. Taking advantage of its established areas but creating new centers of recreation and commerce where there wasn't any before, Oak Creek revamped the former factory space to create the vibrant Drexel Town Square, landed Wisconsin's only IKEA store, recruited more companies to locate in the city to take advantage of its location and quality of life, and is in the process of developing new parkland along the beautiful bluffs towering above their miles of Lake Michigan shoreline.
Suddenly a city of growing vision and possibilities, Oak Creek definitely is - as we named the show - "reinvented and on the rise." In our latest Discover Wisconsin episode, Mariah and I check out everything from IKEA to a lakefront beer garden at Lake Vista Park, plus Drexel Town Square's events, the City 13 Escape Room, restaurants, and more. I enjoyed getting to dive onto a bed at IKEA about a dozen times to get the shot they wanted and downing some Swedish meatballs after. The City 13 Escape Room was a lot of fun, and it's never a bad thing to film at a lakefront park where people are enjoying beer and live music in beautiful summer weather. Mariah checks out the winter action, from ice carvings and the lighting of their Christmas tree.
Catch Discover Wisconsin on FOX Sports Wisconsin Saturday mornings at 10, Saturday night in Madison on WKOW-TV Channel 27 at 6:30pm, Sunday morning in Milwaukee on FOX6 at 10am, or on Roku, Amazon Fire, Google Home, Apple TV, or heck - right now here on YouTube!