MILWAUKEE — Miami had glamour; Houston, vastness. But in the race to win the 2020 Democratic National Convention, it was Milwaukee — plucky, proud and a little faded, that triumphed over its sunnier competitors.

“I always laugh when I think about Milwaukee in the public imagination, because mostly it’s a place where you’re from, rather than a place you go,” said Daniel Goldin, the owner of Boswell Book Co., a bookstore on Milwaukee’s East Side, along Lake Michigan.

In July 2020, tens of thousands of delegates, party officials, activists and news reporters will descend on this city, many for the first time. It will be a transformative number of people for a city of 600,000 that’s unaccustomed to a lot of fuss. Here is what any visitor to the place will need to know, from someone who long ago decided her all-important frozen custard allegiance. (More on that later.)

Partake of the indigenous food.

“Our reputation is fully still cows, cheese, beer, maybe a pretzel or a sausage,” said C.J. Darnieder, 29, as he tended bar Monday at Honeypie, a restaurant in the Bay View neighborhood.

But the state has far more to offer than Schlitz, bratwurst and sauerkraut. Newer restaurants like Honeypie source their meats and vegetables from Wisconsin farms, fish from Lake Superior and craft beers from local breweries.

Some of the old Wisconsin traditions remain: The region’s residents still debate whether Leon’s, Gilles or Kopp’s has the best frozen custard.

Bloody Marys are served with a generous beer chaser, and ordering one before noon won’t prompt any judgment. Try a Spotted Cow, an ale brewed in New Glarus that is ubiquitous in Wisconsin but not sold anywhere else. If you’re driving in from a neighboring state, do as Upper Midwesterners do and buy a case to smuggle home in your trunk.

Get ready to hear about water. A lot.

Water is a major obsession in Wisconsin, especially as fears over climate change intensify. Enjoy the singular beauty of Lake Michigan, which in July will be at its sparkling best, cooling the city with lake breezes. (If you’re tough enough, head to the beach and take a bracing swim.)

Read up on the city’s connection to the lake before you get here, starting with “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” by Dan Egan, a reporter at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and “Milwaukee: A City Built on Water” by John Gurda, Milwaukee’s unofficial historian.

At the charmingly chill Milwaukee airport — after you pass through the “Recombobulation Area” — pick up a souvenir refrigerator magnet with the very Milwaukee phrase “Where’s the bubbler?” (Outside of southeastern Wisconsin, that’s called a water fountain.)

It’s going to be crowded.

There are fewer than 6,000 hotel rooms in downtown Milwaukee and close to 18,000 in the greater metropolitan area. Hotels in nearby counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee, Racine, even Kenosha — are expected to be filled when the convention comes. That means a lot of driving up and down Interstate 94, the main artery connecting Milwaukee and Chicago. If you’re heading south, take a detour and visit Wingspread, a pinwheel-shaped building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose home state was Wisconsin. You might get stuck behind a driver following the local custom of cruising the speed limit in the left lane. Suppress your out-of-towner rage and the urge to tailgate.

Pardon the mess downtown ...

All of downtown Milwaukee feels like it’s under construction. There are cranes, scaffolding, half-built hotels and half-demolished structures. City officials say things will be spruced up in time for the convention, so visitors can enjoy the glass-walled breweries, stay in new hotels and ride a sleek little streetcar that locals call The Hop (it opened in 2018).

Within a block or two of the convention site is Mader’s, an old-school restaurant celebrating the city’s German heritage, and the Wisconsin Cheese Mart, a shop that has been around since 1938.

“It’s going to be insane,” said Max Haglund, 30, a cheesemonger, adding that he is braced for the convention crowds to be overwhelming. “We know everyone who comes here is going to be looking for cheese.”

… and then head for the neighborhoods.

Nearly 40 percent of Milwaukeeans are African-American, and a museum exploring black history and the legacy of slavery, called America’s Black Holocaust Museum, is hoping to reopen in 2019. Some of the older neighborhoods around the city have transformed in recent decades, like Bay View, which is now a hub for art and good eating. Younger people are spurring change, said Jennifer and Michael Wolf, who were having lunch there Monday. “The generational shift in Milwaukee has been huge,” said Wolf, adding that the city has lately become cleaner, more focused on the arts and friendlier to bicyclists.

Still, Milwaukee remains one of the most segregated cities in the country. Arthur Talley, 60, a factory worker who was running errands downtown, said race relations had hardly improved since he was a child growing up there. “We’re still marginalized,” he said. “People see two or three African-Americans coming down the street, and they cross the street to avoid us.”

Embrace the old and the new. Sometimes at once.

Milwaukee doesn’t like to throw things away. On the old Pabst factory campus, there are now loft apartments. Domestic sales at Milwaukee-based Harley-Davidson have slipped, but the city’s motorcycling culture is thriving at the Iron Horse Hotel, a warehouse-turned-luxurious-hotel with a special station for washing your Harley.

And there is still a certain fondness here for anything set in Milwaukee. Along the riverfront is a statue of the “Happy Days” television character played by Henry Winkler, known as the Bronze Fonz.

Here are some handy phrases to say (and not say).

Words to strike from your vocabulary upon arrival: “Rust Belt,” a term that Milwaukeeans are likely to think is dated and vaguely insulting; “heartland,” a word that is rarely used by someone who is actually from the so-called heartland; and “Midwestern Nice.” (The proper term is “Minnesota Nice,” and it doesn’t mean nice, exactly — it’s sort of the Midwestern equivalent of “bless your heart.”)

The friendliness is real.

The ethos of Wisconsin is a little different from what some visitors may be used to at home. Wisconsinites tend to smile a little more at strangers, make small talk in elevators and chat about the weather to fill silences. Milwaukeeans are especially ebullient during the (brief) summers, when the city is humming with festivals at churches and along the lakefront.

Marty Ordinans, a lifelong Milwaukeean who works at a technical college, said he hoped convention visitors would share the experience of his son’s girlfriend, a native Californian who recently ventured to Wisconsin for a visit. “She had a nice time,” he said. “And she kept saying she was struck by how friendly people were.”

But they haven’t forgotten the 2016 election.

Though they were flattered and thrilled by the announcement, Milwaukeeans said they had a feeling they knew why they had been chosen for the convention. Hillary Clinton, the party’s nominee in 2016, didn’t campaign in Wisconsin during the general election, and Democrats, who had seemed sure they would take Wisconsin, lost by a painfully small sliver of 22,000 votes. Turnout in heavily Democratic Milwaukee is crucial to the party retaking the state in 2020.

This time, Ordinans said gently, “They shouldn’t forget about the Midwest.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.