Dedicated on September 21, 1909 as the Milwaukee Auditorium, this is the Miller High Life Theatre at 500 W. Kilbourn Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. This is the same monumental structure that rose where the Milwaukee Industrial Exposition Building once stood before a fire in 1905. Its cornerstone was laid on August 1, 1908, and the building was dedicated on September 21, 1909.
Back then the Milwaukee Auditorium could hold 13,520 people and offered 104,952 square feet of exhibition space; Elizabeth Plankinton even donated a pipe organ. Over the years it hosted concerts, circuses, political rallies and sports events, boasted its own orchestra, and welcomed touring notables such as John Philip Sousa and Enrico Caruso. In the early 2000s the theatre was extensively renovated between 2001 and 2003, at which point its name changed to the Milwaukee Theatre; a later naming rights deal in 2017 gave us the Miller High Life Theatre.
Today the venue seats 4,086 people and can be reconfigured into a more intimate space for 2,500. Picture the crowds John Philip Sousa and Enrico Caruso once drew here, and notice the façade still rising along Kilbourn Avenue.