Heaven City Restaurant (It Ain't Heaven)

On National Avenue in the Town of Vernon, just outside the village of Mukwonago in southeastern Wisconsin, a Spanish-style building with lead glass windows, art-deco details, and a forty-foot tree growing through a central atrium has been cycling through identities for more than a century—Native American gathering place, gentleman's farm, failed religious commune, brothel, gangster retreat, upscale restaurant, and, through all of it, a place where the dead reportedly never quite finished their business with the living.

The land was a favored site for Native Americans long before European settlement. The first documented white owner was Gaius Munger, who received a government quarter-section land grant and made his living producing maple syrup. After Munger, the property passed through a remarkable succession of owners, each of whom bent the land to a different purpose. Abraham Perkins raised sheep and promoted the Wisconsin Central Railroad. Philip Best, the Milwaukee brewer, used it as a stock farm for his work horses. Thomas Spence, a plumbing manufacturer, raised Shetland ponies. George Schuster, a Milwaukee tobacconist, grew acres of tobacco and had the existing large Spanish-style home built around 1917 by Mukwonago's Gritzmacher Builders, modeled after a house he had seen in Palm Springs, Florida. Lloyd Dewey farmed the land and operated an amusement park on the river called Potawatomi Park. Dewey lost the property in a card game in East Troy, reportedly won it back with a lucky hand, and ultimately lost it again when a bank foreclosed.

In 1932, A.J. Moore, a Chicago street preacher, purchased over four hundred acres from the bank and named the property Heaven City, intending it as the site of a religious commune modeled on a prototype he had started in Illinois. The commune failed. By the early 1940s, buildings were added to convert the property into a commercial hotel and resort, and the establishment quickly attracted a clientele that had nothing to do with Moore's spiritual ambitions. Lavish accommodations and fine meals drew what local accounts describe as underworld types seeking getaway weekends. The property reportedly operated as a brothel for a period, and local lore connects it to organized crime figures, with some former employees describing bricked-off tunnels they were told had been used by Al Capone in the 1920s—a claim that, while unverified, is consistent with the wider pattern of Chicago gangster activity across southern Wisconsin during Prohibition and its aftermath. The property passed through a series of subsequent owners, including Pat Talcott, Cindy and Richard Wilkening, and Ralph and Carol Hibbard. In the late 1980s, the building was converted into Heaven City Restaurant, an upscale fine-dining destination that became one of the most popular restaurants in the greater Milwaukee area, known for its romantic atmosphere and high-quality cuisine. The restaurant operated for fifteen years under chef Scott McGlinchey and his wife Mandy Meyer before closing in February 2005. The property has since housed additional restaurant ventures, including The Lakeside, and the adjacent building operates as It Ain't Heaven, a neighborhood bar.

The paranormal reputation of Heaven City predates its restaurant era and is attributed in part to the property's location on land identified as a Native American burial ground. Witnesses over the years have reported seeing apparitions wandering through the building, particularly after closing time. Glasses have been known to fall and shatter when the restaurant is empty and locked for the night. Staff from the restaurant's operating years consistently reported strange occurrences, and nearly everyone who worked there had a story. One former busboy, who took his first job at Heaven City in the 1990s after graduating from Mukwonago High School, later described how the manager informed him on his first day that the building was haunted—a claim he initially took as a joke until he realized the accounts were pervasive among the staff. The building's layered history—its Native American origins, the violent associations of the brothel and gangster period, the sheer volume of human activity compressed into a single property over more than a century—has created what visitors and employees describe as a persistent, ambient charge that never fully dissipates, regardless of what business occupies the space.

Today the Heaven City property continues to operate in some capacity, with the bar next door serving as a local gathering spot where bartenders double as informal historians of the building's past. A Waukesha County Historical Society marker erected in 1999 stands on the grounds, cataloging the property's succession of owners and uses. The Spanish-style facade still stands out against the Mukwonago landscape, looking like something transplanted from another era and another climate entirely. Whatever energy the land held before Gaius Munger arrived, and whatever was added by the gamblers, the gangsters, the commune members, and the generations of diners who came and went through the lead glass doors, appears to have settled into the property as permanently as the foundation itself.