MILWAUKEE (SPECTRUM NEWS) — A piece of indecipherable graffiti became a source of inspiration for the eye-catching new mural outside Broken Bat Brewery.
It’s a story bigger than beer and bigger than the 135-foot wall on the west side of Broken Bat’s new location in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood.
When co-owner Tim Pauly arrived at work after Memorial Day, he saw a massive graffiti tag outside. It was just weeks before Broken Bat’s grand reopening, so Pauly immediately began planning how to remove it.
“It was unrecognizable to the layman,” Pauly said. “We had no idea if it was somebody doing it out of spite or anger or art or what.”
The wall outside Broken Bat’s new brewhouse and taproom near 1st and Pittsburgh south of downtown previously featured an old Royal Enfield logo from the building’s motorcycle manufacturing era. Its current tenants wondered if their fresh coat of paint led to the defacement of their westward wall.
David Zimmerman, known professionally as Big Shot Robot, rode his bicycle past the massive exterior and saw an artistic opportunity.
“I saw it got tagged and I thought, ‘Well, I could use a four-pack of beer,’ so I stopped in,” he said.
Zimmerman offered a few sketches to Pauly, and the two agreed to super-size an extreme closeup of a baseball’s seams.
As Big Shot Robot documented his progress on Instagram, he noticed a few commenters lamenting his graffiti erasure.
“They saw my process and they were like, ‘Oh, that’s a memorial piece for a guy who passed away,’” Zimmerman said.
As it turned out, the graffiti tag read “Habet Forever,” a tribute to an underground legend of the Milwaukee graffiti subculture who died last year. Zimmerman found himself in a tough spot, putting his mark on a massive urban canvas while covering up a memorial to a fellow artist. He reached out to Habet’s brother and started a dialogue.
“That kind of started that conversation that this could be more than just a baseball on a wall,” Zimmerman said. “We can kind of honor multiple communities and bring things together.”
So after rolling 13 gallons of paint over five days in the summer heat, Zimmerman painted a corner with a finishing touch: HABET FOREVER.
“It felt good to have all that newfound knowledge about Habet and some more of the graffiti culture to put into that lettering piece to add on here,” he said.
The mural lets any passerby know exactly what Broken Bat Brewery is about. Pauly said after six weeks of stress, he’s thrilled with how things turned out. He said he’s felt an entire range of emotions this summer, from relocating the brewery to the grand reopening during a pandemic to the saga of the west wall.
With the Major League season set to begin later this month, there will be plenty of baseball chatter in the new Broken Bat taproom. But now brewery staff might drop a curveball in and offer a little art history, too.