After the Sept. 9 committee meeting at which a motion to make the People's Flag the official City of Milwaukee narrowly passed, Ald. Bob Bauman, who voted against that motion, has submitted an altered design for consideration.
Bauman's complaint at that meeting was that the flag did not depict an obvious Milwaukee landmark, unlike the current flag, which is a smorgasbord of pictorial imagery from the 1950s.
At the meeting, Bauman suggested plopping City Hall into the center of the People's Flag, and as you can see from the image above, he got busy on his computer to come up with a bastardization of the design that finds City Hall floating like a cruise ship into the Milwaukee harbor.
Does this guy also think that the Stars and Stripes is lacking a photo of the White House? How about the CN Tower plastered on the Canadian flag, or the Eiffel Tower on the French Tricolour?
As for the so-called "People's Flag" -- either with or without the city hall barreling into the harbor -- it bears a small resemblance to the flag of Reno, NV, which is a pleasing flag.
Robert Lenz’s “Sunrise Over the Lake”, selected after a public competition, which prompted the humorous version with the city hall building.
We went through this in Tulsa-the city councilors did not want to let go of a truly fugly, over crowded flag, so Tulsans had a unsanctioned design contest, then a small private company started printing and selling the winning design. It popped up in so many yards, posters, thongs and t-shirts that it was out of stock, you couldn't order one for months. the city eventually gave in and adopted it. It took them over a year, I think. Fight the good fight against fugly flags!