Brew City isn’t home to the world’s largest coffee cup – that honor goes to Guanajuato, Mexico – but we appear to be the only city in the country with two ginormous coffee cups atop buildings.
The cup and saucer perched on the roof of what is now Caradaro Club Pizza, 5010 W. Vliet St., was originally built by the Milwaukee Coffee Co. when it occupied the space in the late 1990s. It received a Mayor’s Design Award in 1998 from then-Mayor John Norquist.
In 2010, OnMilwaukee’s Bobby Tanzilo reported The Caradaro Club was taking over the space and the new owner, Wally Kutch, wanted to find a new home for the massive cuppa joe in order to replace it with a gigantic slice of pizza. This, obviously, never happened.
Milwaukee’s second larger-than-life rooftop coffee cup is above Stone Creek Coffee’s Factory Cafe, 422 N. 5th St. It's visible from both the street and the freeway. Erected in 2012, this vessel could presumably contain 10,000 regular cups of coffee and was designed to look like a larger version of the coffee cups used inside the cafe, according to the wholesale director at the time, Kristin Palser.
The original plan was to have the illusion of smoke coming out of the cup, but this never came to fruition. (It does, however, remind me of the “Leave It To Beaver” episode where Beaver climbs into a giant "steaming" bowl of soup on a roadside billboard and has to get rescued by the fire department.)
The internet turned up few buildings with rooftop coffee cups, including a Starbucks in Sacramento, Calif.; a coffee shop in Oklahoma City, Okla. and a cafe in Louisville, Ken. But as for cities with TWO massive rooftop coffee cups? That's all Milwaukee.
Watch the process of building and installing Stone Creek's 9-foot coffee cup here:
Molly Snyder started writing and publishing her work at the age 10, when her community newspaper printed her poem, "The Unicorn.” Since then, she's expanded beyond the subject of mythical creatures and written in many different mediums but, nearest and dearest to her heart, thousands of articles for OnMilwaukee.
Molly is a regular contributor to FOX6 News and numerous radio stations as well as the co-host of "Dandelions: A Podcast For Women.” She's received five Milwaukee Press Club Awards, served as the Pfister Narrator and is the Wisconsin State Fair’s Celebrity Cream Puff Eating Champion of 2019.
