Milwaukee Streets and Midwest Roads

Valley of the Condos

2009-01-21T21:28:00.002-06:00

I've heard all kinds of comments about the cornucopia of condominiums that has arisen along Commerce Street. Some people hate the modern designs. Some people hate the sort of people they believe must be moving into them. Some people point out the infamous construction flaws. Some people bemoan the loss of green space along the river.

Many of complaints have some validity. It's unfortunately easy to find concrete spalling and bricks leaching calcite only a year or two after the end of construction. Gentrification is a real problem for lower-income and long-time residents. The Milwaukee River valley is indeed being nibbled away by development that should really have stopped at North Avenue.

But new condos means more people - more homeowners - living in the city, and that is an indisputably good thing. It's good for the city's tax base, good for the schools, good for local businesses, good for the urban environment in general. Bemoan the condos all you like, but I'd sure rather see people spending their money in RiverWest than Brookfield.

Likewise, I'd rather see this part of the city (this is the city, remember?) built up densely, rather than have the equivalent amount of suburban-style development spread out over open land at Milwaukee's fringes.

All the new construction has created some dramatic spaces. Commerce Street, formerly the site of some heavy industry and a rail yard, is a narrow slice of land sandwiched between a large hill and the Milwaukee River. The buildings that have gone up here since 2000 climb the hill, bury themselves into it, or perch alongside the river. Courtyards, porches, balconies, stairs and walkways create a layered pile of public and private spaces.

One of the most exciting aspects of the whole development is just how much creative public infrastructure has gone in.

The monumental Vine Street Stairs from Commerce Street up into Brewer's Hill has poetic quotes inscribed on its risers.

The much-publicized Marsupial Bridge, suspended beneath the Holton Avenue viaduct, is a unique public space. It gives not only a sheltered view of the river and its banks, but also a close-up look at the bridge's massive structure. On wet days, it offers bicyclists a welcome respite from the rain, as well as a handy shortcut from downtown to RiverWest. The gathering space at the east end still seems a little seedy -- even a well-landscaped space under a bridge is still under a bridge -- but has been used for a number of delightful little gatherings, such as evening movie screenings. Likewise, the bridge itself isn't quite as isolated as one might expect; it's much lower to the street and visible that one might expect - though a security camera monitoring one end still gives pause.

The Booth Streets Steps are another shortcut up the bluff to Brewer's Hill. They take dizzying flight into the sky before turning back and descending.

The Milwaukee Rowing Club's new ultra-modern boat storage building stands along the river in a break between two of the condo developments. Its low height allows it to disappear entirely from the street, leaving only the grass-covered roof. At the river, it extends the RiverWalk into a low plaza. That plaza became the site of tragedy in 2004, when two young neighborhood girls drowned in the river while playing on the boat dock. Railings were promptly installed along the RiverWalk in this location, prompting many to wonder why they weren't there in the first place.

The North Avenue Dam, long ago broken to release the river from its captivity, has been put to creative re-use as the base structure for a pedestrian bridge. It connects Riverboat Road to Caesar's Park, a tiny slice of public land including the southeast river bank and the huge bluffs, climbed by a switchback trail. The bridge's style is as modern as the condominiums it serves, with sleek, elegant lamp posts and utterly simple railings.

Caesar's Park was rehabilitated around 2003; after years of being overgrown and potentially dangerous, much of the excess vegetation was cleared out, opening views across the river and eliminating the park's sense of dangerous isolation.

As for the condo buildings themselves, they're quite a mixed bag. Some are forgettable, one or two are rather dreadful, while several are delightful. It's a little heavy-handed to paint them all as sharing much in the way of style; they're all over the map.

Park Terrace Homes

My personal favorites may be the Park Terrace homes, a long line of identical slender row houses tucked into the hillside. I'm a sucker for marching repetition and shadowy articulation, and the Park Terrace buildings have both in spades.

The facade is a little flat and uninspiring when viewed head-on, but that's not how it's meant to be seen, nor how most people will see it. Most passers-by will see the buildings in profile, and that's where they shine.

More fascinating still, a second layer of houses stands further up the bluff, practical standing on top of the first-phase houses. A new road cut into the bluff leads in from North Avenue, serving both the basement-level garages of the upper houses... and the rooftop garages of the lower houses! The entire scheme is bold and audacious, a fascinating response to a difficult building site. (One hopes they got their civil and structural engineering in order, so the whole thing doesn't start creeping down the bluff or filling up with water every time it rains.)

Not only that, the structures are a rare example of modern development that actually lives up to its name. It actually is a terrace, and it actually is in a park!

River Homes at Beerline
The River Homes at Beerline (see how many names you can squeeze out by recombining "River" "Park" "Homes" and "Beerline"?) line the Milwaukee River, and their terraces extend the River Walk ever closer to its ultimate destination of North Avenue. Sadly, they don't yet connect to the lengthier portions downtown, but hey, Rome wasn't built in a day.

The River Homes are the earliest buildings here, and their modern stylings set the tone for many of the developments that came later. The buildings play with massing and materials; rectangular blocks overlap and intersect, while panels of brick give way to EFIS and wood siding as the buildings rise higher. Transom windows line pseudo-towers that rise above the building's mass at the river.

Trostel Square
Trostel Square stands on the site of a former tannery near the western end of Commerce Street. Like River Homes and Park Terrace, the buildings are emphatically modern, clad in a mix of metal panels and brick laid out in patterns that declare the cladding's independence from structure, and massing made of overlapping rectangular prisms emerging from one another.

The buildings dare to use color, mixing light greens and oranges with brushed metal panels and red brick. It's a slightly awkward combination, but it brings welcome relief to what would otherwise be a very monochrome street.

Commerce Bluff
Amid all this unabashed modernism, the Commerce Bluff buildings are kind of a letdown.

Given a narrow site backed up against an insurmountable hill, a tall building was demanded. But the design here doesn't really celebrate that tallness. The gabled roofs seem to be taking a peck at historicism, but they just end up with blandness. A building that should be exciting simply because of its site and height instead is simply... dull.

Union Point
When people comment about how the new condos are "ugly" or whatever other derogatory term they want to use, I always kind of assume they mean the Union Point building. Festooned with tacked-on balconies and saddled with ungainly facade proportions, the building looks like it suffered a head-on collision with a budget shortfall.

I will say this: it has a very impressive profile.

It also adapts to its awkwardly-shaped site, turning a massive block into a block with a twist.

But those balconies just kill the whole thing. They're non-integral to the building in a way that's hard to forgive in a brand-new building, nor do they hold much appeal individually. If they'd been integrated into continuous bands -- as was actually done for the second floor, and again at the sixth -- they'd animate the building, bring controlled pattern and light to its surface, and a sense that the designer remained in control.

River Court
South of Union Point sits River Court, another project that actually lives up to its name: all the units face a central courtyard, which opens up to the river.

Here the intended effect seems to be a big solid cube of gray brick, which has been selectively cut away in places to reveal windows and wood finish beneath. Every element of the building is either "carved" from the mass or seemingly clamped onto it. It's an interesting concept (you see it a lot in architecture school projects) and has been carried out seemingly without compromise. The resulting building is a little hard to love -- it's cool and withdrawn and not terribly exciting -- but it'd hard to dislike it, too, and who can argue with that big courtyard?

RiverCrest Condominiums
The RiverCrest condominiums are another modern batch. Like the Park Terrace buildings, they are built into a steep hillside along the river. Like the River Homes, they play with massing and materials, piling rectangles high to the sky.

Most unusual on these buildings is the creme-colored split-faced brick. While perhaps intended to be a callback to Milwaukee's famous Cream City brick, for me it evokes nothing so much as the creamy-white brick popular in suburban houses of the 1960s that were shooting for the Camelot-era elegance of the time. Reinforcing that image is the stained wood garage doors.

They also use the same carved-away trick as the River Court building, but to a lesser extent; side walls give way to recessed porches opening onto shared auto courts.

Riverbridge Condominiums

A rather plain bunch is the Riverbridge Condominiums, named for the adjacent Humboldt Avenue bridge over the river. Still, the bay window massing and integrated balconies are nice enough. The most dramatic views, however, come from the outside looking in, where one can see the riverside plaza supported on arching concrete cantilevers over the banks of the river. That terrace space is all semi-public, and perhaps one distant day it will be connected to the rest of the RiverWalk.

Highbridge Condominiums

Drama is the order of the day here, as yet another building tucks itself into a steep hillside. The Highbridge condos were the first to go up in this area, and still raise eyebrows with their soaring masses perched precariously on the hillside. There's something fascinating about the bay windows, which read as bits of the building's interior life bursting outwards, unable to be contained.

The building's massing is complex, with different pieces overlapping and saying different things: "grand entry", "quietly domestic", "holy crap I'm flying!"

So steep is the site that the garage entrance is up top, from a dead-end street in the middle of the older neighborhood just north of Brady Street. At ground level, they're friendly enough, though the rest of the street isn't too inviting at present.

Highbridge suffered some rather infamous post-construction problems that led to a lot of lawsuits and misery.

So, yeah, I really like the Valley of the Condos. It's an exciting place, unabashedly new and modern, friendly and welcoming to bikes and pedestrians, with some of the best public space in the city.

Links:

Milwaukee Department of City Development Beerline B page

Bye-bye baby blue

2008-10-23T15:59:00.002-05:00

Much as I hated to admit it, I always figured that the blue brick Midcentury building at North and Prospect would be coming down. Sitting adjacent to an empty gas station and its own parking lot, it'd be an easy sacrifice to make, to allow combination of the lots and creation of one large building site.

I was right... and I was wrong.

They tore down the blue building, alright -- much to my regret. But in its place is coming... a building of similar mass and footprint. Meanwhile, the gas station lot has got its own building already, a brand-new Bruegger's Bagels.

Whahhhh?

Make no mistake, this is definitely an improvement over the vacant gas station (even when it was occupied.) But... I'm a little surprised that something more ambitious didn't arise here.

Meanwhile, the blue building will be replaced by a new branch building for the Educator's Credit Union. Trading out a two-story building for a one-story building? How does that work?

The new building is purported to be a Prairie Style structure, though it's hard to discern from the rendering shown here. The architect, Racine's Genesis Architecture, does show some beautiful Prairie Style work on their web site, so perhaps it's just down to my crappy photograph of the sign.

But I miss the blue building. It's yet another case of tearing down something not just because it's old, but because it's the wrong kind of old. We need a new old instead, an older old! The style of forty years ago is never new enough, and never old enough. By the time Midcentury Modern has aged enough to be old, valued and historic, by the time we're far enough removed from its time to look back on it with fresh eyes and truly appreciate it... Milwaukee will have torn it all down.

Additionally, if the building absolutely had to go... I really wanted one of those bricks.

90 miles apart

2008-10-21T22:20:00.003-05:00

Being in Milwaukee this weekend made me acutely aware of some of the differences between it and Chicago. It's more than just a matter of scale. The difference of size causes different attitudes, different mentalities.

Milwaukee is a city that's still close to the land. It is shaped by topography, sitting atop 80-foot high bluffs that overlook Lake Michigan. It's a small city, small enough that people who essentially live out in the country can take part in its daily life, and people who live in the city have many options for outdoor sports and activities. That connection gives it an often rural attitude. People in Milwaukee come from small towns. They root for the Packers -- it's not just a cliche. They hike and fish and hunt and backpack and camp and canoe on their weekends. That same rural attitude, applied to city living, gives the city an air of smart environmentalism; it also means that Milwaukee sometimes fights against its own nature as a city (just look at the hew and cry over bus funding and rail transit, or the reluctance to convert 794 to a surface parkway, or the fuss over tearing down a useless stretch of highway, or...) Milwaukee is a small niche of the (reluctantly) man-made perched among the vast wilderness of Lake Michigan.

Chicago by contrast has long since conquered nature, which is sequestered away in distant woodlands known collectively as the Forest Preserve. Chicago's Lake Michigan coast is entirely artificial, constructed over a hundred years of city-building, and gives an illusion of control over the vast body of water. The city sprawls for thirty miles in every direction, ensuring no easy escape from its artificial environment. The resources of the Great Lakes funnel down to Chicago, which is the drain through which they flow, the sieve that sorts them, the mill which grinds them up and churns out product. Chicago is less a part of Lake Michigan and more an engine strapped to its side, converting its resources to commercial goods and fountaining wealth across the region.

At their cores, the cities may seem similar -- glistening downtowns perched on idyllic lakefronts (indeed, Milwaukee's lakefront is no less artificial than that of Chicago.) But the difference is in how they spread themselves across the land. In barely five minutes of driving north from downtown, Milwaukee's Gold Coast high rises give way to single family homes, and five minutes after that these houses gain their own private beaches and forests. By Whitefish Bay, the view up the coast is essentially the same as it will be for the next hundred miles. One must travel a good ten miles north of central Chicago to find a single-family home with a lake view. Milwaukee is a short interruption of nature; Chicago is its own nature.

A south side mystery

2008-10-02T22:26:00.003-05:00

It began with a photo on Flickr, showing the well-known brick wall on 1st Street where a Wadham's gas station pagoda once stood. The building's outline remains embedded on the wall, along with part of a painted sign.

"Oh," I commented. "I have a photo of that when it was still standing." But a dig through my film archives showed no such thing. Apparently, I was thinking of this place instead, which I photographed in the summer of 2001.

I have no idea if it was a Wadham's or not. I'm not even sure where it stood -- somewhere between the Modjeska Theater on Mitchell Street, and St. Hyacinth's a few blocks south on Becher Street, to judge by the before and after images on my negatives.

Where was it? What was it? I turn to my readers for answers -- I have none!

Discovery World

2008-07-21T00:48:00.002-05:00

It's hard to argue with the new Discovery World building. From the outside, it's a knockout from every angle. It's a beautiful compliment to the Art Museum addition, without aping it.

I visited Discovery World about a year ago, and got to see how the inside relates to the outside. The building's functions are expressed well from the outside, about... 75% of the way through, I'd say.

The Headhouse is clearly distinct as a gathering point, a circular structure with balconies at the top. Those balconies surround a ballroom/meeting space, and provide spectacular views of the city, the lake, and the new harbor to the south. An awkward moment does occur when storage space winds up being placed on the outside of the third floor space, complete with windows and a view of the harbor. Oops! It might have been better placed in a block with the elevators nearby -- service functions like that should be grouped; it's a basic rule of thumb. It also emphasizes some of the inherent difficulty of a round building.

The main body of the building is laid out along a broad, tall corridor lined with windows facing the bay to the south, an attractive and open space that provides easy orientation.

At the end, one turns right and enters the primary exhibit space, which is dominated by a double-spiral staircase with an elaborate moving model in the center. A window wall to the north provides continued orientation, and creates a delightful view of the colorfully-lit model by night.

Past this point, however, clarity starts to fall apart. A second room on the first floor kind of dead ends. The main room on the second floor is a bit chopped up by its exhibits, with no clear main circulation path. Classrooms and other interactive areas are accessed through an odd hallway that makes one hesitate to proceed, uncertain if they're headed toward a mock TV studio, the corporate offices, or the boiler room. It was at this point that I got the impression that this portion of the building had been designed from the outside in, rather than allowing the functions to generate the plan, and the exterior form to follow from that.

Some of the second floor exhibits were still under construction when I visited, so it's possible things may become more clear with time. Some bold signs would have gone a long way toward clarifying what was where.

Outside, the building and its grounds succeed brilliantly. What was once a completely forgettable section of the lakefront is now fully integrated with the parks and museum to the north, and the newly-opened Lakeshore State Park and the Summerfest Grounds to the south.

The building's water-facing sides are wrapped with cantilevered walkways, offering exciting views of the new harbor and the lake waters to the south. The walkways hook up with a new breakwater with attached docks and a small connected amphitheater. The amphitheater faces a new dock for the sailing ship Dennis Sullivan. It's a brilliant expansion of Milwaukee's already-magnificent lakefront, and adds a worthy attraction to the lakefront's offerings. In light of that, a few architectural flukes are pretty negligible.

Amtrak Station burdened by junk

2008-07-16T20:17:00.004-05:00

I recently visited the spacious new waiting room of Milwaukee's remodeled passenger depot. Perhaps "depot" is a poor choice of words, because the building no longer treats passengers like cargo. The dark and minimal waiting area has been replaced with a vast, bright and airy space.

As a consequence of the narrow space available for the expansion, the waiting room features a strange set of proportions. It is as taller than it is wide, and very long, running uninterrupted for the 300-foot length of the building. The pick-up-sticks wall of angled steel box beams begs to be beheld from a distance, to be appreciated in its entirety, but it's not quite possible with the room's narrow width.

Still, it is an airy and comfortable space, open and inviting, big but not overwhelming, much like Milwaukee itself. The white color continues a trend started by several of the city's most prominent new structures: the Art Museum addition, the 6th Street viaduct, and the new Discovery World building.

Functionally, the space breaks up into three parts. The western half is used for Greyhound passengers; chairs ring a large open area. The center portion is a general dining/communal area, designated by three tall trees and round tables. The eastern half is for Amtrak passengers, and is marked by multiple rows of chairs.

This is not a pristine space; it is of course meant filled with chairs. Several large potted trees enliven the center of the space, breaking up the room's endless length. And the crazy-quilt structure of the window wall itself suggests some of the chaos naturally associated with travel. Yet there is something clean and crisp about it, and I was disappointed to find that the management has seen fit to clutter the entire space with junk.

Much of this detritus was clearly not planned for, and was added after the fact. That monster game machine really should have its own dedicated space, in a game room somewhere (it makes a lot of noise as well, disturbing the peace of everyone waiting to travel.) And while trash cans and ATMs are necessary accoutrement of everyday life, there are ways to deal with them more elegantly than to jam them up against every available column.

One of those ways, for example, is to provide a dedicated alcove for objects like vending machines. It's not beautiful, but at least it gets them out of the way. And it seems that someone had this in mind... but somewhere in the planning process, the fact that vending machines require electricity wasn't accounted for. And thus, while an alcove big enough for twenty soda machines does indeed line the south wall of the waiting area, it's empty, because there's nothing to plug the machines into.

Instead, they cluster clumsily around the ends of the alcove, butting out into the concourse area, not only looking ugly in their own right but giving the space the sort of ad hoc messiness that really shouldn't be present in a freshly remodeled building. Even allowing for the mistake of not including enough outlets, one would think that fifty dollars would be available to pick up a couple of extension cords and get the machines into the alcove where they belong.

Attempts to lure a full-time restaurant to the station have not met with much success, but with this phalanx of vending machines, the station already has the equivalent of a small 7-Eleven.

My one other criticism with the station's interior pertains to the Greyhound end of the waiting area. Travel by Greyhound is a catch-as-catch-can affair; one must wait in line to be assured of getting a spot on the bus. To that end, passengers typically use their luggage as a stand-in so they can sit while waiting. The open space of the waiting area serves this need adequately, providing plenty of seats surrounding the luggage line-up that allow passengers to keep an eye on their bags. Yet it remains a chaotic solution, and I wonder if other, more elegant alternatives were explored (integrating the line with the waiting room chairs, for example, or a numbering system.)

Outside, it took a little bit of searching to locate the bike racks. They're tucked away behind the Greyhound boarding area on the building's west end, out of sight from the road (and nearly everything else.) I'm not sure how I feel about the arrangement; while it doesn't advertise the presence of locked bikes to passersby, it also doesn't seem to be a very well-watched area.

The bike racks are correctly installed, with plenty of room on all sides, and they are the multiple-U racks which are ideal for parking any type of bicycle. Having any racks at all is a great step up from the state of affairs during the renovation, and I do appreciate that bicyclists were given this thoughtful parking arrangement.

Criticisms aside, the new waiting area is a welcome addition to the Milwaukee traveling experience. Hopefully the building's management will soon relocate some of the clutter that's currently dragging down an otherwise pleasant and modern space.

Pritzlaff Hardware Building

2008-07-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

Just across the river from the 3rd Ward is this monster of a building complex. The original two portions, with their endless marching windows and bays, were begun in 1875 as the Pritzlaff Building.

The building originally held a hardware company that, in time, became Milwaukee's largest. The enterprise was begun by John Pritzlaff, a Prussian immigrant who arrived in Milwaukee in 1841. In 1850 he started his hardware company, which would eventually become one of the largest in the Midwest, employing some 400 persons at its peak.

Leaving its original home on 3rd Street (still extant today), the company moved south to a site with railroad and river access. The new building was designed by John Rugee. The center portion of the east facade, dated 1875, came first; the corner portion to the north was likely the next addition. Overall the building was expanded at least three times, in 1916 among others, into a 300,000 square foot complex.

Pritzlaff's son Fredrick would continue as president of the company until 1951; Frederick's son and grandson also entered the business. However, by then the company was in decline; it closed its doors in 1958.

The buildings then became home to Hack's Furniture, who applied their own painted signs to its vast walls of Cream City brick. Hack's closed in 1984, but a family-owned storage business moved into the building.

The buildings were most recently occupied as a furniture store (The Mattress Store) and for storage, but have been largely vacant and underutilized for years. By 2000, the building was under consideration for conversion into a residential space, but no developers were willing to step forward, daunted perhaps by its considerable size.

Six years later, however, Sunset Investors got the ball got rolling on a massive renovation, cleanup, and remodeling. The building is now being converted to a mixed-use project, including 86 condominiums, retail, office space, and a new parking garage that has yet to be built. The project is being overseen by Brookfield design firm Cityscape Archtecture.

The renovation has cleaned the public faces of the building, washing away heavy layers of grime and soot accumulated in its 130-year history. The change is remarkable, letting the building's architectural beauty shine through unblemished.

East elevation in March 2000

East elevation in June 2008

While the renovated facades look unquestionably great, it is still a bit sad to see the building's physical history scrubbed away, losing the appearance of a building unaltered for a hundred years. The building has also lost the 1950s painted signs from the Hack's Furniture days.

North/west elevations, July 2005

North/west elevations, July 2008

Various painted signs for Pritzlaff Hardware remain on the back of the building at present, though the renovation may claim them as well. Some are over a hundred years old; it would be an unfortunate loss.

Above: a painted Pritzlaff Hardware sign on one of the original buildings was partially covered over by a western building addition.

The building's street facades are nothing short of remarkable. The various additions over the years are unified by their Cream City brick construction, and range in style from ornate Italianate to the largely unadorned 7-story addition to the south. An amazingly long line of windows marches down the Plankington Avenue side, beautifully rhythmic, their sheer number hinting at the heights of prosperity and money that drove the building's owners.

The building is remarkably well preserved, its cornice and Italianate brackets unaltered since their original 1875 construction. It street level storefronts are likewise virtually unaltered; the renovation has removed the various ad hoc alterations that did accumulate over the years, leaving a clean and lovely street facade.

Seeing this building renovated and on its way back to life is nothing short of uplifting. In its sheer size and power, it is one of the city's most remarkable structures.

Teweles Seed, before and after

2008-06-25T13:55:00.002-05:00

Continuing to muck around in the eastern end of the Menomonee Valley....

This was Teweles Seed Company in 2003 -- a grungy-looking, ragged old industrial tower from 1918, in brawny concrete and battered brick and glass. The grounds were deserted, home to liittle more than ancient abandoned trucks and dumped tires.

This is the Teweles building today - remarkably renovated into rental apartments, with a shiney modern penthouse addition up top.

It's way too easy to romanticize decay, to lament the passing of the old industrial face of Milwaukee and bemoan the coming of the dreaded condominiums. Don't fall for it. The City Needs More People -- this is the infallible mantra of the savvy urbanist, and will be for many, many years to come. This part of the 5th Ward is a frontier now, but check back in five to ten years and by rights it should be bustling.

(All that said, they seem to be having quite a few management problems.)

More before and after shots may be seen here.

Harley Museum rising

2008-06-21T10:22:00.002-05:00

Long anticipated, greatly hyped, the Harley Davidson Museum is nearing completion. It's slated to open on July 12th.

It's a sharp looking piece of modern design, courtesy of New York City's Pentagram Design. Its factory-like aesthetic fits nicely into the Menomonee Valley, long the city's industrial center.

The campus is a bit sprawling for my tastes, but at least down in the Valley it's not taking away from denser areas. The Menomonee Valley is, by its nature, a large gap in the city's urban fabric. With no plans to change that, it's as good a place as any to host the museum, and having this sort of draw close to downtown is a definite plus.

I'm very pleased to see the riverside landscaping and paths that have been included as part of the campus; presumably these will extend the Valley's biking and walking trails further east. They form a sharp contrast with the brutal rear wall of the main Post Office building across the river, showing just how much attitudes toward the river have changed in 40 years.

As for the building itself, Whitney Gould summed it up nicely two years ago: it's no Calatrava-aping showstopper, but it's taut and disciplined, cooly and respectably modern. I look forward to seeing the interior, and what spatial surprises await within.

5th Ward Building Collapse

2008-06-07T23:21:00.006-05:00

The Journal-Sentinel reports that the Phillip Weimer Building, at 6th Street and National Avenue, has suffered a major roof and sidewall collapse amid today's heavy rains.

June 1, 2008, just a week before the collapse. The small house at right was largely destroyed by the collapse.

The 1892 Romanesque building is part of an amazing lineup of Victorian commercial buildings at the intersection and in the surrounding blocks, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its loss will diminish one of Milwaukee's major historical treasures. The front facade, at very least, should be preserved.

October 2006

Originally built to house a wine and liquor business, the building was most recently home to the Acapulco Lounge, which was closed for renovation. A small fire was reported, but quickly snuffed by firemen. No injuries are reported.

Post-collapse photos may be seen here.

The Corpse of Prospect Mall

2008-06-07T11:39:00.002-05:00

Prospect Mall has been sitting empty for nearly two years now. In 2006, the mall booted out its last few tenants (the Chocolate Factory, a used bookstore, a dismal first-run movie theater) and turned out the lights. What could be done with this vacant hulk?

My first thought was to turn the whole thing into a movie complex. Gut the interior completely, add more screens, completely renovate everything. Add in a couple of restaurants facing a luxurious interior lobby space for a complete all-in-one stop for an evening on the town. Don't make it an interior arcade -- the building's too small for it to work. Make it one single space, lined by storefronts. The East Side already has two great theaters, but they're focused on art house films. A first-run theater might do well, especially if it was maintained to high standards, unlike the ratty Prospect Mall Theater.

My second thought: tear the whole thing down. There's an old brick building under there somewhere, but as it currently stands, the exterior is an EFIS-slathered nightmare, and the interior is a badly dated 1970s attempt at rustic ambiance. The lot is big enough to support something massive, a 5- or 6-story building with retail all around the base. There's no shortage of market demand for the area.

But when I went to get photographs, I discovered that, hey, the brick building might be something pretty nice:

That's some handsome brickwork. That's worth saving.

So now I’m back to my first position: gut it. Redo it. Take off the awful EFIS cladding; repair the brickwork (the building housing World of Wings a quarter mile south offers a perfect precedent.) Restore the storefronts, tie the building into the street, set up a small but quality first-run mainstream movie theater within.

And by doing so, get the black hole out of the East Side's heart.

S.G. Courteen Seed Corporation Warehouse

2008-06-06T09:46:00.003-05:00

If you've ever driven south from the river down 2nd Street, you've seen this monstrous mountain of a building, its wedge-shaped form cutting an 11-story slice into the sky.

Like a heavy-duty iteration of New York City's Flatiron Building, the knife-edge end of the Courteen building seems to lead a parade of industrial architecture up from the 5th Ward.

In fact, the narrow end is the back side of the building. The front faces south, on Pittsburgh Avenue, and is rather tame by comparison.

The building's original owner went out of business in the 1960s. Not much seems to have been done with the property since then, but a lack of boards and broken windows indicates some form of use and occupancy. Its owner proposed a residential redevelopment in 2006 (see article linked below), but to date only minimal work on the building is visible, mostly along the roofline. Delays in commercial development are extremely common, however, especially in the financing stage; it could still be coming. Hopefully it won't involve chopping up those amazingly huge Cream City brick walls.

Aerial view from Maps.Live.com.

After 40 years, Thatcher plans $40 million project - February 2006 Business Journal article

Bradley Tech: the old and the new

2008-06-03T18:58:00.003-05:00

This blog's ostensibly about architecture, but in truth I'm so preoccupied with matters of urban design and historic preservation that I almost never get around to actually talking about architecture. So let's rectify that, shall we?

But first, a topically related preservationist lament:

At the intersection of W. Bruce Street and S. 4th Street, where the massive Bradley Tech High School once stood, remains nothing but an empty field of mud.

I was disappointed that nothing was preserved from this building, which came down in 2006. In particular, the west entrance formed a brilliant termination to Bruce Street, a grand civic statement now lost and not guaranteed to be recovered in whatever eventually takes shape on the site.

The old building was an enormous structure, built in several stages beginning around 1906 as Boys' Tech, and filling more than a city block. It was intimidating but grand; built in sections as it was, surely some of it could have been gutted and reused. The site as currently planned will serve as athletic fields for the school.

The new Lynde and Harry Bradley Technology and Trade School, meanwhile, sits immediately to the south, facing W. National Avenue betweeen 3rd and 4th Streets. The building consists of a round-roofed section, flanked by two more standard box-shaped wings. It is seductive with its strong forms and shiny materials. However, I was rather confused by what I could make out of the interior.

The exterior of the building is a classic Modernist Big Idea: we're gonna make this thing a half-cylinder, lying on its side, intersected by a series of vertical masonry cores. It's bold, it's powerful, it's iconic. Ordinary buildings are based on a floor plan which is then extruded vertically, but this one's a giant hoop, extruded horizontally. That's the Big Idea, the image you see from the street before you ever set foot inside. The result of that idea is that the building should be sectional -- elements that occur at one end should carry through the length of the building. The curve of the roof should provide the basis for orientation throughout the building. However, from what I could see from the outside, the building doesn't seem to work that way.

One end of the cylinder has a massive open atrium, the width of the building. This portion does indeed take full advantage of the building's iconic shape, with the curved roof exposed high above the entry doors, and a massive wall of north-facing glass filling the space with light.

But south of that, it's solid labs and workshops (and, presumably, corridors.) The raw metal cladding of the cylinder ends before it reaches the ground, leaving a narrow exterior passage framed by curving structural members, but this is the only sectional element I could discern from the outside. Viewed from the inside, the Big Idea gets lost.

What else could have been done? Historically, a big, odd shape like a cylinder denotes a large open space -- a gymnasium or an auditorium (or an atrium). Curves are odd shapes -- computer age or not, we still live in a world of orthogonal construction. So you don't want to have to cut walls off to meet them or have glass made to fit their varying profiles. You wanna enclose it once and not touch it again. And the curve is a special shape, so it should remain visible; you don't want to bury it under a dropped ceiling.

So, the building could have been designed as a "building within a building" -- classrooms pulled back from the exterior skin, window walls along the classrooms allowing outside light to filter in, mezzanine balconies replacing typical hallways (enclosed in glass, of course, since the last thing you want to give a bunch of high school kids is the irresistable chance to drop things on their classmates three stories below), all of it opening onto a multi-story windowed west wall. Let that strange curved roof play through on the inside as well as the outside.

Why didn't it play out that way? Could have been any number of reasons. Big atriums require a bigger building. Big buildings cost more money to build, maintain, cool, and heat. But if that ended up being the case, why use a form that screams out "sectional building"?

Some of the oddness also comes to light in the meeting of the cylinder with its two adjoining wings, which are both more traditional in form.

I may be coming down a little hard on this building. Compared to about 95% of the blobby nonsense that's hyped up in the glossy magazines these days, it's utterly practical, and unlike a lot of ultra-modern glass containers, it does have a strong visual identity, a sense of form and mass. Without that cylinder, the building wouldn't be nearly as memorable. But it does seem to suffer from a similar problem as the blobs, wherein a sexy shape is selected for the outside, and then the inside is compelled to fit within.

Milwaukee's new Amtrak station has a bizarre problem

2008-06-02T10:15:00.003-05:00

In town this weekend, I briefly stopped by the newly completed Amtrak station. It looks pretty sharp. I felt a subliminal sense of letdown that the whole area wasn't magically transformed into some majestic gateway to the city, but that's far to much to ask of one little building. The traffic flow, the loading areas, and the existence of a waiting area with natural light are all a huge improvement over the pre-renovation depot.

Didn't have time to go inside, sadly. But I did notice something very strange on the glass facade:

The seagulls, it would seem, have been leaving presents for Milwaukee travelers.

It looks like they must perch on that little L-shaped ledge, with the step up creating a nicely secure spot for them. With downtown's itinerant gull population most recently displaced by the Harley Museum, it's not too surprising that the gulls would quickly latch onto a new perch. I didn't see any while I was there, but my visit was too short to be a representative sample. And if they're not perching there, then they must be dive-bombing it, which... well, that's just too bizarre to fathom, and the marks don't look right for that anyway.

There's a simple and unobtrusive solution, fortunately. Expect some bird spikes to show up on the station's roofline shortly.

Retro post #4: Mother of Good Counsel Church

2008-04-04T00:10:00.001-05:00

Before I started this blog, I made a few posts about Milwaukee on my St. Louis blog. I'm reposting them here where they're more relevant. This one went up on June 23, 2006.

Mother of Good Counsel Church, Lisbon at 70th, Milwaukee Wisconsin. Built 1966-68.

How have I never seen this place before???

It's a beautiful massing of a curved brick screen wall, capped with limestone and studded with protruding bricks, behind which stands a diamond-shaped sanctuary with narrow bands of stained glass.

Next to it is a small parish office building, which brings together a number of fairly typical Mid-Century design elements (the vertical pier intersecting the horizontal plane, the rectangular cutouts, the limestone surrounds), but in an unusually high density -- and with a couple of elements I've never seen before.

Most flabergasting is this original doorway:

I can't believe they designed this -- let alone that it's still here 40 years later. Magnificent!!

Click the images for more photos.

Retro post #3: Goodbye and good riddance to the Whaling Wall

2008-04-03T00:05:00.001-05:00

Before I started this blog, I made a few posts about Milwaukee on my St. Louis blog. I'm reposting them here where they're more relevant. This one went up on May 10, 2006.

Milwaukee lost an iconic landmark this week, and I couldn't really care less.

The "Whaling Wall", a mural by an artist known as Wyland, adorned the Milwaukee County Courthouse Annex since 1997. It was well-known due to its position above the heavily-traveled lanes of I-43 southbound. There's been some hemming and hawing about losing the mural, which was demolished this week along with the last remnants of the aging, decaying Annex, a 1960s parking garage with a level of offices on top.

Frankly, I say screw the wall.

There are no whales in Milwaukee. In the wild, there are no whales within a thousand miles of Milwaukee. There is no aquarium here (well, that's due to change this year with the opening of the new Discovery World building, which will feature a modest aquarium.) The whale mural, basically, has jack all to do with this town.

It is simply an advertisement for Wyland's art business, and a rather kitchy one at that.

The mural is hardly unique; Wyland has plastered them on buildings all over the country. And Wyland is hardly some starving artist struggling to find an audience; his web site is a slick commercial venture that looks primed for commerce on a fairly massive scale. For once, I agree with County Executive Scott Walker -- make the guy pony up to plaster his ad on the side of a public building. And for love of all that is holy, keep it off the pristinely Modernist building of the Milwaukee Public Museum, which Wyland has apparently been slavering over for ten years.

So, let the commuters lament the loss of the whale wall. I'll celebrate the now unobstructed County Courthouse, an impressively massive Classical building that looms over the freeway like a mountain. There are causes far more worth fighting for in Milwaukee than preservation of a lowbrow mural.

Retro post #2: Modernist churches in Milwaukee

2008-04-02T00:37:00.001-05:00

Before I started this blog, I made a few posts about Milwaukee on my St. Louis blog. I'm reposting them here where they're more relevant. This one went up on April 1, 2006.

Milwaukee has a nice collection of 1950s-1960s era Modernist churches, which make for a nice around-the-town tour as they're scattered across the inner suburbs and newer areas of the old city.

Click on any of the photos to view lots more of them on my Flickr.com account.

St. Stephen Martyr Church (now Chapel), N. 51st Street - 1969
A symphony of piercing angles and lapping shadows.

St. Matthias, 9300 W. Beloit Road - 1967
It features a finely detailed roof more powerful than a ship's prow, and a commanding corner wall of stained glass that glows spectacularly in the afternoon sun.

St. Rita, S. 60th Street
A glowing lantern of a building, with half the walls washed away by stained glass. The original architect returned to oversee a restoration in 2003, shortly before his death. It suffers from it city context; it's clearly an object, meant to be sitting like a crown on a hilltop.

Walther Memorial Lutheran Church, 4000 W. Fon du Lac - 1954
Fairly stock low Modernism -- right down to the characteristic orange brick.

Sacred Heart Academy and Monastary, 7300 S. Highway 100, s. of Hales Corners
Robert Venturi would call it a duck -- it's a building in the shape of the object it represents, in this case a giant crown. But within the bounds of the kitchy overall design are a number of enamoring details, including a wonderful arcade.

Retro post #1: Farewell to West Milwaukee

2008-04-01T15:00:00.002-05:00

Before I started this blog, I made a few posts about Milwaukee on my St. Louis blog. I'm reposting them here where they're more relevant. This one went up on 26 February, 2006.

I passed by West Milwaukee today, the industrial-based inner-ring suburb attached to Milwaukee's western flank. The road running south from Miller Park stadium has long been a fascinating vista of towering grain elevators -- almost a hundred of them -- and mighty factories. It was a land of heroic architecture, concrete mountains that stood pure and powerful and enormous in the slanting light of a late afternoon sun.

But, no more.

Last summer, with the 2003 closure of the Froedtert Malt Corporation's West Milwaukee operation and a corn milling plant run by Archer Daniels Midland company a year later, a series of the grain elevators began coming down; this month, most of the remaining ones are coming down, as I discovered this evening. Layers of building have already fallen, revealing a second layer behind them. Generic big box retail will replace them all, as Miller Park Way (still known as 43rd Street elsewhere in the city) evolves into another version of S. 27th Street.

How depressing. One can already surmise what's going to go into this place, how dreadfully dull and boring it's going to look, how placeless and forgettable.

Even if I'd had my camera, the light was already too dim for photographs. I don't know when I'm going to be able to get out there in daylight -- maybe Friday. The old axiom proves true yet again: photograph now, for it'll be gone next time you're there. Only the southernmost stand of Froedtert elevators remain untouched, and I'm sure their time is coming up quickly.

Photographs from January, 2004:

I've always loved the bizarre juxtaposition of the lightweight Italianate office/research building with the massive, purely functional behemoths directly behind it. The office is gone now, reduced to a few chunks of concrete foundation. The elevator won't be far behind.

Photographs from October, 2004:

The old Hotpoint Appliance factory across the street, with its stout smokestack and multiple rail spurs curving into its grounds, is now stripped of facade and in mid-demolition.

Demolition photographs from July 2005:

Up the street, new suburban-style strip malls are sprouting faster than the weeds growing between the railroad ties. The very character of this part of town is transforming before our eyes, a tidal wave shift from industrial to residential and retail. I can't fathom what recyclable use such a gigantic collection of industrial structures might have, but I still feel keen regret at the change: when it's over, I won't really have any reason to stop along this stretch of road again. Everything that made it unique, everything that gave it such a commanding presence, will be gone.

Coast Guard Station farewell

2008-03-29T00:03:00.003-05:00

Sad news: the lakefront Coast Guard Station is rubble.

The full story is in the Journal-Sentinel.

Photos can be seen here at Flickr.

(and no, I haven't forgotten Milwaukee! I'm planning on some return trips, and blog updates, once spring becomes a little more spring-like.)

A short reflection

2007-12-09T12:26:00.001-06:00

It dawned on me one day what makes Milwaukee so cool.

In short, it's big enough to have lots of cool stuff -- but small enough that the cool stuff is concentrated in a relatively small area.

I used to regard this as a shortcoming. I love to wander cities on my bike, and it seemed like Milwaukee just didn't offer all that much territory that was worth wandering about in. By the time you hit West Allis, you've reach the end of the interesting stuff. The northwest stretches on for mile after boring mile. The south is fascinating in its diversity and vital struggling immigrant growth, but it's pretty finite, cut off sharply at 35th Street and more dully around Oklahoma.

But what you have left -- the East Side, downtown, Riverwest, KK and Bayview, and above all the lakefront -- are just packed to bursting with interesting things and people.

Consider an evening in September. I stopped at Bradford Beach to watch volleyball and parasurfers. I biked past hundreds of docked boats at the marina, in all sizes and degrees of extravagance. I stopped to watch a rugby team practicing. I then followed the sound of bagpipes to find a troop of bagpipers rehearsing. As I watched and listened, a tall ship sailed past, while a tech school class learned surveying techniques, and a parade of walkers, joggers, and bikers passed by, and the sun set in fiery colors behind the downtown skyline.

Where else can you find that much going on in such a small space?! Where else?!

Brady Street Bike Lanes?

2007-11-19T09:40:00.000-06:00

A friend who bikes a lot to get around recently put to me this proposition: Brady Street desperately needs bike lanes.

How're they going to get them? I immediately asked. Simple, came the answer: get get rid of the street parking.

The merchants will never, ever go for it, I said, and with good reason: businesses thrive on that kind of easy, short-term, highly visible parking. Parking doesn't have to be physically close, but it has to be percieved as close, easily accessible and easily found.

But then I thought about it further. Brady does get a lot of bike traffic already; it's at the core of Milwaukee's most bikeable neighborhood. How much would that increase by if it weren't so narrow and intimidating? Would it perhaps be so bad to sacrifice parking on one side of the street? Would the loss be compensated by an increase in bike and other foot-based traffic?

FYI, I count about 30 parking spaces on the north side of Brady, east of Humbolt; and roughly the same number west of Humbolt. Would 60 short-term parking spots be an acceptable loss?

It's hard for me to be completely objective. When I ride Brady Street, I'm usually going nearly the same pace as traffic -- sometimes faster. When you're keeping up with the cars, it's easy to justify taking a lane, and the moving cars don't seem so intimidating when you're going nearly the same speed. It's more important to take the lane, too. At those speeds, getting hit by the opening door of a parked car ("doored") could be fatal. So I've never worried much about a lack of bike lanes.

Lots of other people ride more slowly, however, and to them the cars are whizzing past at breakneck speed. Either that, or they're stuck behind the bicyclist, poking along at 10 miles an hour, wishing there was some chance to pass. Bike lanes would reduce or eliminate this problem.

Having lanes on one side of the street would also reduce by half a biker's chance of getting doored.

On the minus side, the perception of a wider street would inevitably lead to faster-moving traffic. One reason I can keep up with traffic on Brady is that the cars are only going 25 mph or so, sometimes less. That's about the fastest speed that feels safe in Brady Street's narrow confines. Widen the street and the safest perceived speed will rise, and actual speeds with it. This would in turn degrade the slow-moving, pedestrian-scaled ambiance that makes Brady Street so appealing to begin with, the physical scale that makes it seem like it'd be a good place to ride a bike -- a far more damaging loss than the elimination of a few dozen parking spots.

I had a professor once who made the point that pedestrian malls are only a good idea when a place is so crowded that there's no more room for vehicles. He noted that if any street in Milwaukee might be headed that way, it's Brady -- but it had a long way to go before it hit that point. I'd say it still has a long way to go before cutting out a lane of traffic would have more positive than negative results.

On a related side note -- those traffic-calming sidewalk bump-outs aren't doing Milwaukee cyclists any favors. I live in dread fear of hitting one of those things dead-on and going flying over the handlebars.

Highland Park - Not a huge loss.

2007-11-08T08:48:00.000-06:00

Old news, this one, but I wanted to mention it anyway -- the old Highland Park public housing towers at 17th Street and W. Juneau are history, demolished over the summer.

Is there terribly much to regret, even for an avowed Mid-Century Modern fan such as myself?

These cylinder-shaped structures, dating from 1967, weren't especially pleasing to the eye, apart from their precast concrete panels with their quirky incised geometric design. They were part of a superblock, a limited-access space breaking up the street grid. They have no relationship with anything around them.

The buildings' primary purpose has already been supplanted by the new Highland Gardens building, a mid-rise structure. The towers had been largely emptied out by attrition.

Was there anything good about them? Umm..... well. Though isolated on their Modernist towers-in-the-park lot, they might have provided more density to the area than most of the surrounding housing, which is distinctly suburban in design. Much of the entire neighborhood, in fact, appears to have been destroyed at some point and rebuilt with a suburban ethos, leading to vast, empty, forbidding streets that serve as little more than conduits for west-bound commuters after work.

But, new small single family houses and an expanded street grid will replace the towers and various other public housing buildings. The street grid expansion is particularly heartening, coming as it is to a neighborhood that's long been rendered placeless by suburban models of development. It will reconnect these blocks to the rest of the city, and expand options for travelers within and passing through the area.

Links:
- Aerial view of the towers at Maps.live.com
- Sierra Club report on the new homes
- Undoing 'urban renewal' at Highland Park - Business Journal article

The FREAKIN' Pabst, Man

2007-11-05T10:07:00.000-06:00

It'd take a hard, horrid person to dislike the Pabst Theater. It's a magnificent and intimate venue, lovingly restored, carefully maintained, integral to the history and culture of Milwaukee, and host an unending stream of terrific shows by top-notch artists. It just killed me when I had to miss Lucinda Williams and Susan Tedeschi on successive nights a while back.

But. Milwaukee, do you ever get the feeling the Pabst and Riverside are kinda talking down to you?

There's just... something incredibly annoying about the whole style and tone of their ongoing ad campaign of the last two years or so. Something about the random multiple font sizes drifting all over the ads. Something about the corny, slightly-too-enthused descriptions of performers ("the beret-wearing singer-songwriter who looks like she just walked out of a Jack Kerouac novel"). Something about having the famous hit song titles floating around randomly in the newspaper ads. Something about having poor Bruce Winter read these ads over and over again on WUWM.

It's like they're certain we've never heard of any of these people, and will only be persuaded to go if we hear gushing, simply-worded acolades from the advertisers. It's like they don't trust us.

I dunno. Maybe it works! Maybe it sells tickets. Maybe most potential concert-goers really don't have any idea who Rikki Lee Jones or Josh Rouse are. But still... don't you occasionally feel like we're being regarded as a bunch of uncultured rubes?

Also, the emphasis in "the freaking Pabst, man!" should be on "Pabst", not "freaking". Don't people look at what they paste on their buildings??

The Great Gray Zone

2007-11-01T22:54:00.000-05:00

Came across an old entry in my personal journal, from before I started this blog, and found it of some interest. From May 15, 2006:

I spent Tuesday evening driving all over northwestern Milwaukee. The city expands for many miles in that direction, the only corner of its rectanglular boundaries that hasn't been bitten off by some other municipality. The shift into suburbia is slow and gradual indeed, measurable in tiny increments of decreasing density and increasing yard size.

I don't even have a real name for the kind of development that permeates those endless blocks. It's old suburbia, the kind now known as "inner ring" -- developed between the World Wars, or in the boom years immediately after the second one. It's more spread out than the older streetcar suburbs where I like to make my home (St. Louis's Central West End, West Philly, and now Milwaukee's East Side). But it's not the endless, faceless sprawl of modern suburbia, either.

The buildings of commercial strips found at major intersections still come out to the street, still work to establish major intersections as places instead of just real estate. The houses still have some relationship to each other. The street wall is lower, wider, and less defined, but it's still there. There's some traces of City Beautiful planning, mostly in the form of wide boulevards with grassy medians down the middle. Small apartment buildings are plentiful -- little individual buildings that could almost pass for mid-sized houses, holding two apartments on each of two floors. The houses are compact, often small, some to the point of being cottages. Small traces of Mid-Century Modern enliven them: angled metal pole columns support porch roofs; horizontal slat fences define yards and balconies; large geometric patterns break the monotony of garage doors.

Yet in Milwaukee, it's still something of what Jane Jacobs described as "the great gray zones" -- not the lush, rustic countryside, not the pleasant charm of a small town, yet not dense enough to support the true pulsing life of a city, either. It's a step up from modern suburbia, but just barely. Most of the benefits are superficial -- and even those have diminished as this zone of expansion has been tarnished by age. The architecture has hints of what it was emulating, but the truly superlative moments are few and far between. Demographically, almost everywhere I went last night was inhabited by black people, just like the neighborhood that contains the diminished parish of St. Stephen Protomartyr... and long, sad experience whispers to me that predominantly black populations all too often tend to be poor and beset by a common set of social ills. Some of the neighborhoods show the tell-tale signs of decline, the early notes of people starting not to care or not having the money to keep things up. It's an odd thing to see in what are essentially Modern buildings, but many of them are pushing 50 years old now -- well past the age when neighborhoods start to get cast off by the well-to-do.

And I fear that, truthfully, there's not much to recommend these places. Their biggest appeal was that they were new, and that they accomodated the automobile more easily than any existing cityscape; neither condition applies today. The terrain is flat, straight, and boring -- Villard Avenue, in fact, ends at a local airport. The streetscapes are cohesive but bland. The density is such that a car is a requirement of daily life. The yards are small and not especially charming. This is the new and future ghetto of Milwaukee, and once it sinks I fear there will never be much reason for it to change.

(On the other hand, some of these areas are quite nice, in a leafy shade-tree-street kind of way. And while I mention "tale-tell signs of decline", the bulk of the buildings I saw appear to be in good to excellent condition.)

And in yet another illustration of how it's hard to see what's right in front of you... I have almost no photographs of the places I'm describing. They didn't strike me as remarkable, so I never documented them, even though I found them worth writing about. So very strange...

City Hall Rising... in cost.

2007-10-30T08:40:00.000-05:00

City Hall's Settling, er, Unsettling News - JS column by Jim Stingl.

We've Sunk a Bundle Into City Hall - JS column by Mike Nichols, in which the author has the gall to propose tearing down Milwaukee's single most iconic pre-Calatrava building.

Not related, but:
Want a really long commute? Take the 'A' train - JS column by Patrick McIlheran. Man, I hate it when snotty* conservatives are, more-or-less, correct.

(Of course, his unspoken argument of "BIG CITY BAD, SMALL CITY GOOD, SUBURB BETTER" dodges the issue of, who's the more successful city, New York or Milwaukee? Which one has the most valuable real estate? Where's the most money being made? Which one is drawing the most people? It also disregards the likelihood that 40 minutes on the train is far more pleasant and potentially productive than 25 minutes fighting through traffic.)

* "Snotty" because in this and other columns, there's this unspoken, passive-aggressive implication that suburbs are the one and only thing that everyone really wants, that all their problems are just propaganda, that they and they alone represent the perfection of some kind of American democratic libertarian ideal of Free Choice For Everyone, that the only reason those annoying cities even exist is because... someone, probably evil liberals, forced innocent suburban taxpayers to surrender their hard-earned dollars to give away to undeserving urban elitists, that the only reason anybody lives in cities at all is because freedom-hating commie terrorists are forcing them to, and that if a city advocate dares support urban development of any kind anywhere, it's going to force everyone everywhere to live jam-packed into hundred-story high rises.

The truth is a tad more murky than that, since most of those suburbs wouldn't work or even exist without the insanely expensive government-funded Interstate highway system to function as their backbone, or without the government-funded GI bills that favored such development for decades, or without the urban core to act as the seed-germ that allowed them to exist at all. And god forbid people advocate building urban environments in the city! That's just crazy talk!

I'm a little unfair taking it all out on this one poor columnist who does make some efforts to be balanced in his reporting, but it's a hypocritical, paranoid, unfair, and inaccurate attitude I've seen time and time again among conservatives and/or suburban advocates, and I'm more than a little sick of it. We're not coming to take away your stupid mega-mansions and half-acre lots. We just want to live the way we want to live, and maybe not pay for your billion dollar highway expansion that we're never going to use.

Pabst Brewery Demolition

2007-10-29T17:25:00.001-05:00

Pabst Brewery from the east, October 2004.

I've seen it happen several times in St. Louis and Milwaukee: a massive complex of buildings, built up and added onto over many decades, is abandoned, decays for a while, becomes an urban explorer's paradise, finally gets bought up, is partially demolished, and winds up redeveloped.

It's that "partially demolished" bit that always brings me down.

Building 3

Building 3 under demolition

I've never worked on the design of such a complex, so it's hard to say just what is and isn't always possible. Certainly there are times when one building needs to come out so that light can reach the windows of its neighbor. Sometimes remediation is simply prohibitively difficult. And of course decay takes a toll on abandoned structures, and not everything can be saved.

But it seems like, inevitably, the final result is to thin out and water down some of what makes such complexes so fascinating, which is their delightfully jumbled massing. A place like the Gallun Tannery or Pabst Brewery is a visual pile of buildings on top of buildings on top of still more buildings, scrambled up and accumulated piecemeal over a long and complex history. They have the density that cities need built right into their very structure. They are frantic masses of architecture, laden with secret corners and hidden delight.

But the first thing developers do is to come in and start knocking things down -- tearing away at the very thing that makes the complex so compelling.

Building 11

Building 11 under demolition

There's a loss of history and architecture, too. Building 11 at the Pabst Brewery was of the same age and architectural style as the historic buildings that are to remain, and had nicer crenellation details than many of the survivors.

Purely functional accretions are frequently swept away, too, removing the gritty industrial nature of places like Pabst. Pipes, ducts, and non-architectural structures are removed as a standard part of sanitizing a complex, seemingly with no thought given to how they might be reused and incorporated into the renovation.

Jungle gym, vine-covered trellis, multi-colored sculpture, surreal pagoda, scenic overlook, straightforward monument to industrial history -- there are innumerable possibilities for such a construct, if one looks beyond the norm.

Power Plant

Power Plant under demolition

But we live in a culture that strives to sanitize, to the point that simply taking on the challenge of renovating a historic complex is already going far out on a limb. To leave it looking something like the aged industrial complex that it actually is? Outrageous! Out of the question!

However, much to the credit of the developers behind The Brewery, Building 20 will apparently retain its multi-story atrium and the enormous brew kettles within.

Even more impressive, the grain elevators -- described on the site as iconic -- will be retained, and are advertised as a potential location for an elevated restaurant or similar facility. That's exactly the sort of creative thinking needed for a site like this -- not just on a macro scale, but also carried down to the fine details.

Wetlands in the Valley

2007-10-22T01:05:00.000-05:00

One summer evening a while back, I was headed by bike out to the Target near Miller Park, headed west through the Menomonee Valley. Imagine my delight when I found that not only had a very smooth and generously wide bike path been completed alongside the road, but that some of the vast lands of the former Milwaukee Road Shops had been converted into a sort of neo-wetlands park.

Two massive smokestacks are the final structures remaining from the enormous complex that once sprawled over many acres. Intended to be preserved as a tribute to the area's industrial heritage, their future was in doubt for some while. But they have been successfully restored.

April, 2006

August 2007

The smokestacks form the centerpiece of the new Chimney Park. Around them, the modest and cleanly modern landscaping that has sprung up underneath the 35th Street Viaduct looks great. New holding ponds attempt to restore some of the wetland that was lost in the rush to development over a century ago. Simple curving gravel paths wind among them, complete with small viewing overlooks and scattered benches.

Overall it's a lovely and peaceful counterpoint to the renewing industry that fills the rest of the valley.

Signsrelate the history of the valley, as well as the intent of the various new projects that have gone in.

The signs and the bike trail are part of the Hank Aaron State Trail, an ambitious effort to create a continuous connection from the lake all the way out to Miller Park. From the description on the web site, the east end has a long way to go -- they want you to go through some alley, turn, turn again, turn again... I've been through that area plenty of times and never seen any signage to indicate where this all is supposed to happen.

But west of 6th Street, it's pure biking bliss.

As a bicyclist, I can't overstate how much I appreciate this bike path. It's broad, separated from the street, gently curved and sloped, and freshly paved with smooth asphalt. It runs unbroken for several miles, providing easy passage through an area whose potholed and train track-laced streets can be intimidating. And future expansion plans are exciting -- imagine being able to ride from the East Side on the bike path, down to the lakefront, then all the way out to the State Fair grounds -- all without having to ride on a major road!

Train Station Progress

2007-10-13T23:59:00.001-05:00

Milwaukee's train station has been under remodeling for a year or so, and it's coming together. The inside's a shifting maze of construction partitions and temporary spaces as the work moves around to keep the station operational during construction; outside, the strange tangle of structural beams that form the new front elevation has been assembled, painted, and clad in glass. The space behind it will serve as the new waiting area, a bright and open space to replace the old dim and dingy interior.

The remodeling meant the loss of one of the city's most prominent examples of New Formalist architecture, but the building as built was an unacceptably degrading way to enter the city, with a dim and depressing interior virtually devoid of windows, natural light, and charm of any sort.

I don't know what to think of the crazy-quilt arrangement of random diagonal structural members; it looks a bit like somebody's pet crazy academic theory come to life, or else random chaos -- an attempt to substitute flash for substance and well-designed order. But at least it should make the waiting room space interesting, and it'll make the station easy to find: meet me at the pick-up-sticks building! The news space will certainly be bright, inviting and spacious.

But amid all the hype surrounding the waiting room and ticketing remodel, what's being overlooked is that the process of boarding trains will remain as uninviting as ever, since the renovation will not be touching the train shed.

The train shed (and I cannot think of a more appropriately derisive name for it) is and will remain a singularly dingy, undignified and unattractive place. It is lit solely by sodium vapor lamps. It sends passengers down a mini-maze of grungy concrete tunnels. And as a space, it's utterly forgettable, with almost no design elements beyond basic necessities whatsoever.

The entire art of boarding and detraining with grace seems to have been lost in America. Most of the great train sheds of yesteryear have been retired (St. Louis's Union Station) or demolished (Chicago's Union Station, New York's Penn Station, the latter famously eulogized by Vincent Scully: "Through it one entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.") The Penn Station train shed was a true work of art, a cathedral in raw iron and glass, with shafts of sunlight piercing its depths. Milwaukee's train shed is a dingy bunker that deserves to be ripped down and replaced with something designed by someone who gives a damn, rather than someone committed to putting up the cheapest roof possible.

Still. The rat warren may remain at trackside, but at least Milwaukee will soon have a dignified place to wait for a train.

Meanwhile, down in Chicago....

2007-10-12T16:07:00.000-05:00

So I'm livin' in Chi-town now. I still have a lot more topics in Milwaukee to wrap up, but here's a few notes from 90 miles south.

First off: I never thought I'd miss Milwaukee's mamby-pamby wussy-foot drivers, but now I'm not so sure. When drivers in Milwaukee come across a guy on a bike, they generally act as though they've never seen such a thing in all their lives. They hang out behind it as if they're scared to get too close, and they will not pass unless they can give like twenty feet of clearance. I always figure Milwaukee drivers think their cars are much fatter than they actually are.

It's always annoyed me -- I need drivers to GO, to pass me quickly, so I'm free to dodge and swerve around whatever obstacle come my way. If a car's hanging out behind me, I can't juke around potholes or opening doors or whatever, because I don't know where the car behind me is.

But not down in Chicago! Oh, Chicago drivers know exactly how wide their cars are, they know the biker only needs about a foot to spare, and lord almighty that's about all they give you!

On the plus side, drivers down here aren't so all-fired determined to give up their right-of-way at four-way stop signs. In Milwaukee, it doesn't matter if the driver got there first, it doesn't matter if he's been sitting there five minutes waiting to go, it doesn't matter if he's having a fricking life emergency -- if he sees a bicycle within half a mile of that stop sign, he's gonna sit there and wait for that bike to go! Nothing infuriates me more than coming to a complete stop, only to have some driver insist that I take a right-of-way that's not mine. Dude. I've already stopped. You're not doing me any favors. You're just wasting everyone's time -- yours, mine, and whoever's waiting behind us. You think I'm gonna run out in front of you and your half-ton death machine? What, do I look stupid? If I was stupid, I'd be driving!!

Take your damn right-of-way!!!

*phew*, I needed to get that out of my system.

Second: I have taken an initial measure of the North Branch Chicago River "bike trail", and found it wanting. Much of it's either too rough, too twisty, or too sidewalk-like to qualify as a useful bike path. On top of that it repeatedly changes sides of the river and crosses very major roads instead of ducking under bridges. But the worst offender was a portion near Touhy Avenue that suffers from a severe case of "designed by architects".

"Designed by architects" is my derisive catch-all for any built object that puts style over functionality, to the detriment of the latter. In this case, a portion of the "bike trail" is actually a concrete sidewalk, that repeatedly offsets like a stair. If two bikers were negotiating this in opposite directions, they'd take a path that hits both of the inside corners and inevitably collide. You don't make a bicycle go through a right-angle turn! Oh, but it looks so cool to have this sidewalk that just ends, but only it doesn't end, it actually keeps going! Designed by architects.

Coast Guard Station Salvation?

2007-10-08T10:00:00.000-05:00

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=671253

A new proposal has been floated to rehab the 1916 Coast Guard Station along Milwaukee's lakefront, calling for conversion of the Prairie Style building to a maritime museum focused on Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. The time limits on the previous proposal, an Indian cultural center that's been floating around in fund-raising limbo for 4 years, expired over the summer, prompting Milwaukee County to call for its demolition.

The Coast Guard station has been allowed to rot for decades, subject to fires, a deteriorating roof, and a collapsing sea wall. In its current state, it's one of those buildings that easy for laypersons or developers to dismiss as an "eyesore" (one of my pet peeve words as it's so often abused and misused.)

Renovated, however, it could be a thing of unquestioned beauty. It's a bit hard to see through all the window boardups and general decay -- this building has none of the ornamental razzamatazz of City Hall or the Pfister Hotel. Its beauty is a bit more subtle.... and till it's renovated, it's hard to fully appreciate.

I will say this: it's absurd that anyone would oppose a private for-profit entity's proposals to redevelop this historic property. Opposition to private business on the lakefront is meant to keep it from turning into a giant parking lot or housing development -- not to remove options from preserving important parts of its own heritage. We allow the marina to operate. There's a kite stand, a concession stand, bike rentals, the Art Museum, Discovery World, Alterra... we really couldn't find a way to let some restauranteer or other willing entrepreneur get in and do what must be done to salvage the Coast Guard Station?

The building after an April 2005 fire that damaged the roof.

This is an existing building, not someone coming in out of the blue and gobbling up open park land. It's a part of the lakefront's heritage. Show some common sense, Milwaukee! This handsome beast deserves to be saved.

North Point Lighthouse

2007-10-05T10:54:00.000-05:00

The historic North Point Lighthouse and its conjoined keeper's quarters have been empty for many years, but over the past year an extensive reconstruction project has been bringing the 1888 keeper's house back into a proper state. I've been dropping by on occasion to follow the progress.

October 2003:

Boarded up and closed for years.

April 25, 2007:

Lots of wood elements are being removed, indicating extensive rot.

June 10, 2007:

New porch framing and sheathing.

August 11, 2007:

New roof and cladding.

September 27, 2007:

Grounds beginning to shape up.

The current lighthouse was built in 1879 (replacing a 1855 structure threatened by bluff erosion) and re-used the existing lantern. Its height was doubled in 1912 as trees growing on the bluffs obscured the view, and it operated until 1994.

When work is finished in the fall, this venerable old structure will be opened for tours. Huzzah!

More on the North Point Lighthouse: Seeing the Light, including a vintage postcard of the original appearance of the tower and keeper's house, showing the house's original design intent a bit more clearly than can be seen today.

Bayshore Town Center: Still a Place for Cars

2007-10-01T14:26:00.000-05:00

Having made a few trips up there, I figure it's time to throw out my two bits' worth on Bay Shore Town Center.

Let me start by saying that, whatever gripes I and others may have, they've really achieved something remarkable here. It's a brand new Main Street, something we haven't built in America in five decades. It does a lot of things right: streetside parking, sidewalks, lots of visual and functional connections between inside and outside, public spaces, mixed uses, a welcoming and inviting atmosphere. There may have been some tactical and strategic blunders along the way, but the people who built this thing were striving to make something a cut above the usual suburban drek of our times, and I really appreciate that.

That said, I have some gripes. Some are easily fixed. Others... well, like I said, this sort of thing hasn't been done for fifty years, so maybe it's inevitable that it'll take a few tries to work out the kinks.

Make no mistake about this place: pedestrian-oriented or not, parking is still king. Parking lots, curbside parking, parking garages, and more parking lots surround and suffuse the place. There is an assumption in place that 100% of customers will arrive by automobile. You can see it in any number of ways.

For example: where the hell are the bike racks?! I surveyed the entire complex and, after much searching, located a grand total of three bike racks in the entire place. One's next to Alterra Coffee, one's kind of tucked off to the side by the central plaza, and one is a battered relic outside the entrance to Trader Joe's, which itself is rather detached from the pedestrian action to the east. Only this last one seems to be placed with the idea that customers using a store might arrive by bicycle.

The sidewalks ought to be lined with small M-racks, or the loops that simply bolt onto parking meters. Every major store ought to have a longer set of M-racks. Kohl's certainly has the room for it:

In a complex that's overflowing with parking, the lack of consideration for bicyclists is appalling. This problem could be fixed with relative ease.

For a "town center" based around a Main Street concept, the complex is a bit disconnected from the actual main commercial artery of Whitefish Bay, Silver Spring Drive. To get from Silver Spring to the heart of BSTC requires navigating a winding road past a minefield of parking lot and garage entrances. It's intimidating on a bike and not much fun in a car.

Winding roads, in fact, seem to be commonplace. It's largely an artifact of working around randomly placed existing buildings. Whatever the cause, it slows traffic down to a pedestrian pace (in such intimate quarters, that's a good thing), and it gives the commercial portions of the complex a bit of charm they might otherwise lack. To claim the place is without any sense of the past is not really accurate -- the whole thing is very much shaped by the existing mall buildings that have gone up over the past few decades.

On the east side, Bayshore Town Center remains as oblivious as ever to its residential neighbors, facing them with vast parking lots and the backsides of the mall's older buildings. The new exit to the east doesn't even align with the street across from it.

Probably the intention was to have the new street on axis with the central plaza, but a more respectful approach to the existing street grid would have been to align the road with the older street, then curve it as required to bring it onto the desired axis. At the outer edge of the complex, nobody is going to be awe-struck by the axial view past a hundred yards of parking lots.

On the west side, the Center pays proper homage to the nearby roaring interstate -- by turning its back to it, showing little besides parking lots and garages. This is the proper place to load up the sea of parking -- not where the mall abutts an older suburban neighborhood.

As others have mentioned, the architecture is largely forgettable -- a mishmash of contemporary commercial (acceptable, not especially interesting) and historical pastiche (corny, depressing), with the sole exception of a snazzy Modernist steakhouse, clad with a stunning contrast of polished flat-cut black stone panels, and random ashlar stone.

It's not as though the same red brick and EFIS that clad most of the buildings couldn't have been used to more memorable effect. It could have. But the designers or the owners wanted something that would conjure up vague images of an ambiguous historical past, and weren't willing to pay the considerable amounts of money it would take to do it right. That's the thing about contemporary architecture: it's good design adapted to today's building technologies. Do it right and it can be (relatively) affordable and good looking! Try and reproduce.... whatever it is they're trying to reproduce here without using the real materials, the real techniques, the real craftsmanship that went into the original, and you're going to end up with buildings that look like soggy cardboard.

And finally, at times it seems the architects didn't quite leave themselves enough room for all the ugly necessities:

There's also a lack of benches or other places to simply linger, outside of the central plaza.

So. There's lessons for next time. Meanwhile, the revived Bayshore seems to be doing a good business. You go there and you'll find people wandering the sidewalks, mingling, travelling on foot, even if only for a little while. Given that this is the closet thing we've had to urban expansion in the northern 'burbs, it's hard to find fault with that.

An Unfortunate Decision for the Goldmann's Building

2007-09-28T18:19:00.000-05:00

Today was the final day of business for Goldmann's Department Store. Though the store was virtually empty of goods and wares, the lunch counter was packed throughout the day. At mid-afternoon, a crowd gathered to hear words from Mayor Barrett, the store's current and future owners, and neighborhood representatives.

Among the words of bittersweet reminisce and optimism that the building will continue as a place of commerce and communal gathering was a statement regarding its architectural future. The building will be remodeled inside and out, with the exterior being returned to its 1920s appearance.

I think it's a big, big mistake to do this.

Exploratory work has been done on the west elevation, removing some of the CMU coverup facade to see what remains of the older building beneath. From what I can gather, it looks like there might actually be two older facades underneath the 1950s coverup, one on the west side dating from the building's original construction (a strongly Victorian composition in red brick) and a circa 1920s reworking on the Mitchell Street side in brown brick. From the looks of what's been exposed, none of what remains is in particularly great shape, and a lot is missing. It can certainly be repaired, but it's going to be a lot of work.

But the end result will be undistinguished. Not that the building itself will necessarily look bad, but it will simply be more of what we already have lots of in Milwaukee. Brick Victorian commercial buildings are a dime a dozen in this town. Heck, there's a brown brick Chicago School building right next door.

The kind of bold, slightly campy yet unabashedly Modernist facade that has adorned Goldmann's for the last fifty years, however, is a vanishing rarity in Milwaukee. When this facade is wrecked, there won't be another one like it in the city. It is a unique creation, and its demolition is no less an architectural tragedy than the demolition of 19th century buildings is.

You want historical value? Nobody born after 1945 is likely to even remember the way the store used to look. For most Milwaukeeans, Goldmann's current appearance is simply how the store has always been.

Does it fit with its surroundings? Well, exactly which surroundings are we talking about? The Beaux Arts detailed Schuster's building? The Deco building next to that? The wood-framed gabled buildings with Flemish curved facades? Maybe the 1960s Modern bank across the street? Mitchell Street is a riot of architectural styles, both high and low, each one contributing to the street's visual vitality. Removing its premier 1950s entry will not enliven it, but make it more bland.

Is the facade bland and boring? Not at all. A close look rewards the viewer: the facade uses several different kinds of CMU, two of them tinted, one with ground glass embedded in it. Metal panels cover another portion of the facade, with a minimalist clock (sadly nonfunctional) at one end. A marching row of metal rods sits in front of this portion, offering an endless play of shadows as the sun moves across the facade. Details include the clock, the shiny aluminum and neon sign, and the bold lettering on the western facade.

People gathered today to lament the loss of an institution. Yet the loss of its physical embodiment was treated as cause for celebration. I'll say it again: in twenty years, people are going look at the heritage of the 1950s, and wonder why the heck we didn't save any of this stuff.

Book Bargain

2007-09-28T08:46:00.001-05:00

The Heritage Guidebook by H. Russell Zimmermann is on sale at Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops for $5. It's a thorough guide to "landmarks and historical sites in southeastern Wisconsin", with entries on hundreds of buildings in Milwaukee and the towns surrounding it. It's well worth picking up, especially at that price!

UWM Needs New Bike Racks

2007-09-27T16:07:00.000-05:00

For all the effort that UWM puts into encouraging its students not to drive to the crowded campus...they sure don't seem very committed to encouraging bicycle use.

Take a look at the bike racks at the Union, mid-day on a Wednesday:

They're jam packed. All three racks are full, and more bikes are locked to the guard rails around a nearby stairwell.

But look at the racks. They're the old-fashioned gridiron type. This type of bike rack is meant to have the bike's front wheel lifted over it. This requires a considerable ffort on the part of the users, especially if the racks are crowded. (If??

But many bikes today (such as my own hybrid) can't fit over these racks. Users then have no choice but to lock nothing but the front wheel -- an open invitation for the rest of the bicycle to be stolen.

Modern racks are a W shape, like these outside the Grand Avenue Mall downtown. They allow bikes to roll in without lifting and allow all types of bikes to be locked by the frame, not just the front wheel. They are permanently installed, rather than being a loose rack that gets shoved around when empty. And they are far more attractive.

UWM should be installing these, rather than letting this clear need go so inadequately met.

Doomed Mid-Century Modern

2007-09-26T23:50:00.000-05:00

This little bat-winged building stands in West Allis, on Greenfield at 61st Street. It faces a simpler building across a parking lot. Both are fenced off; the second building appears to have undergone abatement (removal of asbestos and other hazardous materials.) Abatement's the harbinger of either renovation or demolition. Given the vintage, I'm betting on the latter.

It's a shame. The bat-wing building is particularly nice, with two clusters of multi-height hanging lamps at the apex of its pyramidal roofs, overhangs lined with downward-aiming can lights, and a stepped roof unlike anything I've ever seen. Like the similarly-conceived Mark Twain Cinema in St. Louis, I'm sure it looked impressive when lit up at night.

The sign -- another interesting period piece -- announces it as the St. Ann's Village Center, offering bingo, but the VV logo points to a previous name along the lines of Value Village. The second building was most recently a sales center for bathtubs and whirlpools.

And so another bit of our Mid-Century heritage passes away. In twenty years, they're gonna wonder why we didn't save any of this stuff.

Walgreens revisited

2007-09-16T20:57:00.000-05:00

A recent Journal-Sentinel column praised the design of the new East Side Walgreens on Oakland Avenue. I agree, as a building, it's pretty sweet -- it's a set of bold forms, with some nice accent detailing (it's forbidden in these Modern days to call it "ornament" even though that's exactly what it is, but that's a subject for another post.) It's pleasing to look at, and a big, big step up from a typical suburban outlot Walgreens.

But it's still a Walgreens. It still means we lost our neighborhood grocery store, the only one within easy walking distance for thousands of UWM students and neighborhood residents. It still replaced a functionally identical Walgreens just a block south.

But I've griped about that before. It was a business transaction, among consenting private entities; the fact that it screwed the entire neighborhood.... well, that's just tough luck for us, right? Free market and all that. Me, I've been doing my best to avoid the Oakland Walgreens since last summer, when they killed off our Sentry.

For the present, here are a few other notes:

- The bike racks, which I had understood to be respectfully placed within the brick wall recesses along the sidewalk, are in fact located nearly at the back of the lot, on a sidewalk alongside the store -- a clear statement that they were an afterthought, not a priority. Similar non-consideration was given to the propane tank storage, a crude metal cage plopped on the sidewalk (and closer to the entrance than the bike racks.)

- I can scarcely fathom how enormous the parking lot is, especially for its highly urban location. I wonder if it will ever be anywhere close to full. I wonder if Walgreens has any statistics on how many of their customers arrive on foot or by bicycle. But hey boy, lookit that there green space!! That's what Oakland & Locust really needed -- not more businesses, not apartments, but some fantastic green space. After all, it's an arduous five hundred foot walk to the nearest major urban park.

- Someone was clearly hammering a square peg into a round hole. The Oakland Street elevation consists of massive glass windows, which open up the store's interior and allow passersby on the sidewalk an inviting view of....

...the doors to the bathrooms?!

And where are the window displays, which, y'know, are ostensibly the point of having display windows? Windows can also serve to open up the space to the outside, and to bring natural light, but those seem to be verboten under retail rules of conduct, and indeed if you removed the blue panels you'd find yourself looking at the backside of a display shelf.

- There are several nice benches and half-walls to provide space for people to sit while waiting for a bus or whatever else. It's a thoughtful gesture.

- I've heard many people over the years complain about Modernist design, and a couple in regards to this particular building. I perosnally find an unambiguous beauty in this sort of bold massing contrasted with delicate, transparent ornament.

It may be chilly, but it looks nice!

2007-09-15T09:19:00.000-05:00

It's been a beautiful week in Milwaukee! Clear skies and crisp air have drawn me outside with my camera every evening this week, and I've come back with a crop of great photos.

Many more can be seen here.

Two urban articles, and a note

2007-09-13T23:21:00.000-05:00

Two interesting and topically related articles in the Shepherd this week:

Urban Living, Sprawl and Transit: an interview with former mayor John Norquist.

On the Road to Sprawlville, Shop 'Til You Drop: a look at the shady politics supporting the exurban Pabst Farms development.

- - -

The FlexCar system has debuted at UWM! This fantastic idea lets you essentially rent a car on an hourly basis -- allowing you to bypass the expense and difficulty of car ownership without suffering the negative side effects.

- - -

On a personal note, I will be moving to Chicago at the end of this month, in pursuit of both professional and personal goals. This blog will remain in place, for the foreseeable future at least. Given the mental backlog of topics I still want to write about, I could keep going for quite some time!

Amtrak vs. My Bike

2007-08-30T22:33:00.002-05:00

Following, an email I just sent to Amtrak's customer feedback:

Ahhh, another weekend, another trip between Milwaukee and Chicago.... which I won't be making on Amtrak.

Why? Simple: I can't take my bike.

Sure, I could put it in a box. I could also saw off my arm and put that in a box, too. It'd be only slightly less practical, and not nearly as painful.

I tried the bike-in-a-box thing once recently. A friend and I struggled for nearly 45 minutes to disassemble the bike and awkwardly cram it into the bike box, then jam it with some difficulty into the car (it didn't really fit).

Essentially, we took this incredibly efficient, sleek, compact, lightweight form of personal transporation, and turned it into an unweildy, awkward, enormous piece of oversized and immovable luggage.

We finally got to the station only to find they wouldn't let me on the train with it; I had to check it in as luggage. Luggage!! They wouldn't even let me just walk onto the (half-empty) train with it. It was maddening!! I nearly screamed in frustration, and almost missed my train as a result -- my friend had to come back to the station and take the box away before I could board.

You guys NEED TO CHANGE THIS POLICY. It's a bad policy. It's dumb. It costs you business. It discourages people like me -- those who rely on a bicycle for transportation -- from riding your trains.

There's no excuse for it. You've got the room. Spend a few bucks, take out a couple of seats on each train, or make them fold-aways, and poof -- room for 3-4 bikes. Have the rider carry the bike up themselves, require them to bungee cord them down. Make them wait till most passengers have boarded if need be; don't allow them on rush hour trains if you have to. Very simple. This works for New Jersey Transit. It works for Philadelphia's regional rail. It works for Chicago's Metra system. You're telling me it can't work for Amtrak? All those little dinky local rail systems can manage something that Amtrak can't?

When is this going to change, huh?

With that incentive, I'd gladly shell out the $21 for a ride to Chicago on a weekly basis. Without it, my money goes to Megabus, and Amtrak gets nothing but my ire.

For the uninitiated, Amtrak will only allow bikes on their Milwaukee-Chicago trains if the bike has been put in a taped-shut box and checked in as luggage. They might as well just tell us to take our bikes and stick 'em. It's a measure that's utterly impractical.

I'd love to have my bike down in Chicago on the weekends, and I hate having to lock it up at the train station, but thanks to Amtrak's absurd policy, there's not much other choice.

Newly carless

2007-08-29T19:52:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago, I sold my car. It had been legally out of commission since failing emissions at the end of July, and I stopped driving it after that. I have not replaced it yet, and don't have any immediate plans to do so.

This makes me one of five housemates, all adults, all licensed drivers, none of whom own a car. Yet this was not a decision based on urban or environmental idealism. I was just sick of spending money on the thing. It needed work immediately, probably a thousand bucks' worth or more. I didn't use it much in my day-to-day life -- mostly as a convenient way to get to work on rainy days, and occasionally to port the groceries home. I don't really need it for work, at least for the foreseeable future. And the bulk of my social life is centered around the East Side, where everything's in easy walking or biking distance.

The value I got from it was simply not equalling the value I was having to put into it. For the moment, the equation holds up for getting a replacement car, too. That may change when winter rolls around, but we'll see.

For now, my short-term debt has instantly evaporated thanks to the money from selling it and the refund on my insurance; I no longer have to budget out hundreds of dollars for endless maintenance and repairs; and I no longer care about every little noise from the alley that used to be somebody potentially breaking into it while it was parked.

Do I miss the mobility? Sure. Most of all I regret the inability to convey other people. When a friend needed a ride from the train station, I was only able to help because one of my housemates happened to have a borrowed car available.

I've made a few adjustments to my routines, such as more frequent stops at the grocery store on the way home from work. I more willingly spend money on things like bike repairs or cab fare -- they're a lot cheaper than the endless whammies of gas, insurance, repairs, maintenance, and registration. I have to limit how I pack for my weekly trips down to Chicago. I've learned how to bungee cord a lot of oddly-shaped items to my carry rack.

I may replace the car come winter, if the need arises; I would definately miss being able to zip around the city with my camera, which gets tough on bike after November or so. Still, with Zipcar coming to the East Side, I just might be able to get along without a car of my own.

Looking back 4 decades

2007-08-10T21:54:00.000-05:00

From the Journal-Sentinel last week: Flash Point: Racial tension in the summer of 1967 fueled deadly violence, a fascinating snapshot of Milwaukee's social and emotional state 40 years ago, as violence and rioting engulfed portions of the inner city. It's part of a series reflecting on the 1967 riots.

Demolition everywhere you look

2007-08-06T21:21:00.000-05:00

A lot of buildings are coming down at the moment...

Demolition has been ongoing at the long-shuttered Pabst Brewery since around January; this is the second major building to come down, but many smaller structures have been removed as well. This one sported a beige smokestack with "PABST" in glazed white tile; its 1950s Modern window walls were a favorite subject of mine:

Not far away, serious work has kicked in on the old Pfister-Vogel Tannery:

Most of the one-story additions and small outbuildings have been taken down:

Remediation work has been underway on the facade of the main building, with environment suit-clad workers riding a cherry picker up to the windows along Water Street. It looks like the demolition will move west to east, which would leave the most important brick facades intact until the end. The strategy seems to be to take down the lower portions in the back, which should give the taller portions in front somewhere to fall, including the towering smokestack. I'm waiting to see if a crane shows up on site to salvage the enormous roof-top water tank.

And finally, I was shocked on Friday afternoon to see that the last standing portion of the Grede Foundry was actually being knocked down:

The office building has been standing, heavily frayed at the edges but essentially intact, for over a year now -- long enough that I'd almost convinced myself it was going to be saved. Why it was spared for so long is a mystery, but as of today it's entirely rubble.

I just hope someone salvaged those handsome raised aluminum letters; they were slick (especially on their polished stone background.) I'd been eyeing them myself for a long time!

Hold Your Nose

2007-07-23T21:22:00.000-05:00

AUUUUUUUUGH

The pungent, potent, powerful aroma of Milwaukee beaches in the summertime has returned at last. The smell of rotting dead algae was wafting up the bluffs this afternoon and was still strong as far away as Downer Avenue.

It's so embarrassing. Can't something be done about this olfactory assault?

Goldmann's Department Store

2007-07-10T21:32:00.001-05:00

As was heavily reported a month or two back, Milwaukee classic Goldmann's Department Store will be closing its doors in October, The independent department store has operated since 1896; in recent decades it has lost noticable business to big box stores and department store chains. Its owners, both in their late 70s, have chosen to retire and wish to close the store while it remains a profitable venture.

The store's interior has remained virtually unchanged since the 1950s, and even then it wasn't massively altered. The exterior was given a Modernist facade in the 1950s, including a handsome clock and a fabulous neon sign.

I was passing by this weekend, and stopped in for a lengthy look around. Normally department stores are loathe to have people roaming about with cameras -- but I wasn't the only one at Goldmann's. I explored every inch of the place -- basement, first floor, a mezzanine, and second floor -- and found it packed with oddities, relics, and delightfully mismatched odds and ends.

Even with the 1950s interior renovations, the place retains much evidence of its Victorian origins. Exposed steel beams, an old staircase and modestly elaborate railing, and a prevalence of wood construction speak of a building much older than its facade.

The building's plumbing and HVAC systems are a mishmash of haphazard accumulations, added piecemeal over the decades. Some of the pipes in the mezannine area are actually at forehead height -- a condition that would never pass muster with today's building codes. Cooling is provided by massive free-standing air conditioners the size of refrigerators, dating from the 1960s. Heat comes from radiators scattered randomly about, some right in the middle of the sales floor.

It is these systems that more than anything doom the interior space as a whole -- they'll never pass code today. The building will surely be gutted by its new owner for renovations.

That sales floor is home to a vast array of merchandise -- clothing in a huge array of sizes, suits in a rainbow of colors. The men's department is presided over by a tailor in his 70s who has worked in the store for decades and has known it since childhood. Alterations and pressing are done in-house.

Cash registers throughout the building are vintage analogue machines, the kind that disappeared several decades ago from most other businesses:

Long-dated "modernizing" touches are scattered here and there. They give the strong impression of being installed in the mid-1960s, when the New Formalism movement was at its peak -- particularly these faux concrete thin shell arches, complete with hanging globe lamps:

The diamond backgrounds for the Men's Wear sign create a similar effect of intended Modern elegance, though they could also date from the Googie excesses of a decade earlier.

At the other end of the first floor, the lunch counter is a slice of 1950s diner streamline, against a backdrop of Victorian decorative touches. Three walk-in counters with curving ends offer seating to diners perched on fixed, round, green-cushioned stools.

(Victorian? Yes -- note the floral column capitals:

When it comes time for fixtures to be sold off, I'm sure someone will pay a hefty price for the slick daily specials sign and its integrated clock:

On the mezzanine level, in addition to a wide selection of lamps and shades, the store contains its own mini-museum of photographs, old newspaper ads, and antiquated calculting equipment:

Of particular interest is a photo of the building prior to its modernization:

(Personally, I find it more interesting with its current facade!)

The store's Going Out of Business sale has begun. In the basement, a corner has already begun accumulating empty clothing racks, and spaces in the 2nd floor are emptying out as well. The time to go see this amazing retail time capsule is now -- it won't be the same for much longer, and very soon it will be gone forever.

Solvay Coke Plant

2007-07-10T00:02:00.000-05:00

Sandwiched inbetween the rail lines east of Kinnickinnik and the Milwaukee and KK rivers is a long-abandoned industrial site, with the remains of a number of buildings crumbling away among weeds and broken concrete. A bit of online searching reveals that this is the remains of the Solvay Coke Plant, which operated on the site from around the turn of the century until 1983 when it was abandoned. The coke manufacturing process is intensely toxic and left the site a contaminated brownfield.

Several intrepid explorers have published photos of this fascinating complex of buildings, including an especially good one here. Most of the site has been demolished in the last couple of years, a massive blank slate awaiting cleanup and redevelopment.

Other pages:
Photos from when the plant was in operation.
Development plans, from the Journal-Sentinel.

Summerfest Promenade

2007-07-08T13:05:00.001-05:00

If you've ever been on a stroll down Philadelphia's glorious South Street, then you know what a true urban shopping street is -- a destination, a gathering point, a place where there's always a crowd. It draws the young and the old, the normal and the deviant, families and singles -- everybody. South Street pulses day and night, and people come there not just to visit its innumerable shops, bars, restaurants, and other businesses, but also just to hang out, to watch people, to disappear into the anonymous crowd. The desire for such communal interaction is a basic human need, and South Street fulfills it beautifully. One can observe the same thing at work on Chicago's Clark Street and Michigan Avenues, and Madison's State Street.

So. Where is Milwaukee's South Street?

Some would point to Brady Street, and I'll admit, it's come a long way -- even in the six-going-on-seven years that I've lived here. But even at its summer weekend night peak, Brady never really has a crowd. If you walk up the street, then back down, then back up, anyone paying attention will notice that you went by three times. There's not enough people there to get truly lost in, and while I won't say it's outside the realm of possibility, I don't see that kind of environment in Brady Street's future.

You could also point to the Water Street bar district, but it's a one-note show: an ordinary downtown street in the day, with the crowds only coming out on weekend nights -- and those crowds are functionally homogenous, basically people who are there to go to the bar. It also suffers from being on a major boulevard of a street. East North Avenue is another possibility; its business offerings are much more diverse, but hemmed in as it is by the river and the hospital, its growth is probably about maxed out. The crowds there on a Saturday night are, again, just not thick enough to cut it. The rest of the city's commercial and nightlife streets -- KK, Milwaukee, Farwell/Prosepct -- are all smaller still.

There's the lakefront, but it's mostly a daytime operation, and it's physically separated from the fabric of the city, and its crowds are too thinned by the sheer size of the place to provide urban anonymity.

We simply don't have a South Street here. And as a self-respecting city, we really should.

- - -

If you check the Shepherd-Express's yearly Best of Milwaukee poll, one of the votes that jumps out is "Best People Watching Spot: Summerfest." Summerfest?! Our best people-watching spot is only around for ten days a year!

So... could the Summerfest grounds become Milwaukee's own South Street?

What I'm thinking of is a pipe dream to be sure, but indulge me a moment.

The Meier Festival Grounds are a rather haphazard jumble of permanent stages and kiosks, with no clear sense of navigation or orientation. It was planned and built piecemeal, with nobody quite anticipating how enormous the whole production would eventually become. It's hard to find your way around when the place is jam packed with thousands of people. Sound bleeds between the stages, and you never know if you've missed some aspect of the festival or not. A master plan was finally developed back in 2000, but hasn't really been implemented in full.

If unlimited funds were to fall like manna from the heavens, I'd love to see much of the existing grounds torn down and redone with a clear, comprehensible master plan, oriented along a clearly defined, broad central circulation path. And in doing so, I'd love to see the vendor booths, special exhibits, and midway rides re-oriented to form one long strip of uninterrupted boardwalk-style bliss along the water's edge. Separate it from the stage areas, and they could keep it open all summer. Milwaukee's lakefront has beaches, a marina, lovely walkways, a wonderful pier, lots of trees and grass and even a lagoon... but where's our boardwalk? Summerfest should be it.

Like I said -- it's a pipe dream. I especially can't see it happening now that the new Lakeshore State Park is open just across the water -- can you imagine the howls of outrage if a semi-permanent carnival was announced a hundred feet from a prairie preserve and camping ground? I can't even imagine how successful such a venture might be; for all I know it might fall flat on its face -- there are relatively few people living nearby, and without the music of Summerfest, the remainder might be much less of a draw. But if it worked, it would provide the one component of a major urban city that Milwaukee just doesn't quite have -- our own South Street.

And to have an old-fashioned shore town-style boardwalk would be so, so, so cool!

Related articles:
History of the Summerfest grounds
Plans for renovations to the grounds, an article which believe it or not came out *after* I'd written most of this post.

A simple proposal for Cathedral Square

2007-06-24T22:36:00.000-05:00

As a followup to a previous post...

Jazz in the Park, overcrowded as it is, probably isn't going anywhere. It is organized and sponsored by the nearby businesses that benefit from its proximity, and any other location would fail to bring them that business (though it's easy to imagine them providing some kind of festival-style tents at a different location, it'd also be a huge hassle.)

So if that's the case, if Jazz in the Park is going to remain a defining feature of Cathedral Square... shouldn't the park's design reflect that fact?

Shouldn't there be a permanent stage, instead of a clearly-temporary tent, which smothers the park's central design element?

Looking to the park's past, it's immediately clear where a permanent stage should be located:

The north end of the park once held the county courthouse. A new permanent stage could be located there without disturbing the park's basic form. The benefits would be numerous.

For one, if it was designed as a sufficiently substantial construct, it could consolidate a number of functions which are currently left haphazardly scattered around the temporary stage: storage, bathrooms, and whatever functions the mobile trailer parked behind the stage serves.

A large number of Port-a-Potties are left sitting around in the park all summer, and it really just looks like hell. They're Port-a-Potties -- they're made for construction sites, not green space. It's not how you're supposed to treat a respectable major urban park. Even if a new stage didn't include the same number of toilets, it could include some kind of screened section where additional portables could be located for the summer. Alternately, two separate sets of bathrooms could be provided, a small set for everyday use and a larger pair opened only on Thursday evenings.

Second: a new stage at this location would allow all that space that's behind the current stage to become viewer seating, and make it much more pleasant when Jazz in the Park's not in session by getting rid of all the temporary junk. If the new stage backs up all the way to the sidewalk, the park could actually gain useful space for Thursday nights. At worst it'd be a break-even situation.

Third (and I don't know how much of a concern this is, but it's worth mentioning), it would have the audience with the sun at their backs, which is usually nicer than squinting into it.

Fourth: it would provide a badly needed sense of spatial closure at the park's north end.

Fifth: it'd be the perfect time to reconsider the rest of the park's detailing. I complained earlier about the park's unappealing pathways. Some simple additions could completely alter the feel of the park:

That's Zeilder Park downtown. A few simple elements transform a plain asphalt walk into a place that invites one to linger and relax. Half-walls and permanent picnic tables could achieve the same along Cathedral Square's edges.

So what're the drawbacks?

Money, money, and money. Putting up a substantial building with electricty and plumbing is not an insignificant undertaking, nor is maintaining it year-round. Time, also -- such a construction project could shut half the park down for a year or more, including an entire summer.

Spatially, the park would lose some of its central green space where the stage would be, though what remained would be a nicer space for it. In an ideal world, we could poach ten or fifteen feet off of E. Kilbourn Avenue -- look how ridiculously huge it is! In reality, it'd probably be very difficult to make it happen. Removing the two central paths in favor of paths near the park's edges could also compensate for the loss.

As I said before, the powers that be should consider options. If Jazz in the Park is truly here for good, then the park that hosts it ought to be treated accordingly.

Sitting through red lights

2007-06-24T21:44:00.000-05:00

Y'know what drives me utterly mad? Sitting at unnecessary red lights.

Oh, I understand that Water Street has to yield to Wisconsin and vice versa. And that such major streets, tied in to so many other major streets, are going to be impossible to synch up perfectly. That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about intersections like Oakland and Edgewood, at the bottom of the hill as you head north into Shorewood. Oakland is a major commercial street. Edgewood's a minor residential side street; it has no other lights. Yet after sitting through the entire red light at the previous intersection (also a minor residential street), I had to sit through the entire red cycle at Edgewood, too.

It doesn't make a lick of sense! Those cross streets have nothing that they have to synch up with. If you sit through one, you should cruise through the other. You should never pull away from a fresh green only to watch a light two blocks ahead of you turn red.

It'd be a minor complaint if I didn't encounter this sort of problem all over the place. But it happens constantly, all over the city, and it's utterly maddening. It wastes gas, it wastes time, it creates extra pollution and traffic. Any gains in traffic slowing, I'd bet they're offset by people speeding away out of frustration and/or a desparate desire not to get caught at yet another red light.

I really don't know what other motivations there could be behind such a system. Some of these intersections are probably triggered by under-pavement sensors that start the change when a car pulls up at the red light. If this is knocking them out of synch, couldn't they be set to skip the green for the side streets if no cars are present? That happens at two side streets on Oakland north of North Avenue, and it works just fine.

The breakwater: still my favorite spot.

2007-06-19T20:54:00.000-05:00

Ah, glorious summertime has descended on Milwaukee at last! After endless months of dark, damp and damnable cold, southeast Wisconsin can now savor four hard-earned months of gently warming sunshine and cooling breezes off the lake. Milwaukee's summers are as picture-perfectly mild as its winters are intolerabley awful, and I treasure every second of them.

(Yes, mild. I grew up in Louisiana. Don't even try to tell me that it gets hot up here, 'cause after six years I can tell you: it doesn't!)

The lakefront comes fully alive on wonderful summer afternoons like this one, crowded with bikers, roller bladers, people out for a stroll, sunbathers, swimmers. I love the lakefront... yet my favorite spot in the whole city is surprisingly removed from all this -- removed from the city itself, in fact.

The breakwater runs out into the lake for half a mile, protecting the marina and the boat launch from the lake's open waters. It's open to the public all day, and is frequented by fishermen and walkers, as well as the occasional jogger. A sign instructs visitors to walk their bikes, but I've found if you ride slowly and gently, nobody seems to mind.

The views from the long concrete and steel pier are spectacular. The shoreline stretches away to the north, and due west city skyline can be seen in full, often across a harbor full of sailboats at anchor.

It's a fine spot for watching fireworks as well, as dozens of boats make their way in and out of the harbor, and the skyline glimmers beyond. The enormous flashes of light disappearing into the lake's black void make one mindful of just how enormous Lake Michigan is, and the crack of the explosions echos bizarrely off the wall of downtown skyscrapers. One can clamber out onto the piled rocks near the breakwater's end and find many comfortable spots to nestle for the show.

Even in the wintertime it offers some entertainment, as the waves pounding against its vertical sheet metal pilings throws water as much as ten or fifteen feet in the air. In the cold months, the water freezes and piles up, building ice mounds that cover the entire pier to a height taller than a man.

It's a unique place, never mentioned in the tourist guides, and not immediateley obvious despite its central location. But it's well worth seeking out, especially with Milwaukee's grand summer now in full swing. On a fine day, it's always full of people and life.

New Formalism in Milwaukee

2007-06-17T22:46:00.000-05:00

It's a style that can be found in just about every American city; Milwaukee has a few scattered examples, and Chicago is flooded with them. For years I referred to it as Onassis Modern, since it seems to embody the white elegance of 1960s upper crust society, the final gasps of the guilded ages. But recently I ran across an architectural history book that gave it a more proper name: The New Formalism.

(Man, my name for it is totally better!)

Whatever you call it, it was an early reaction against pure Modernism, or at least Modernism's total rejection of historical precedent, and perhaps a distant precursor to Post-Modernism. It attempted to take Modernism's simplified forms and overlay them on aspects of Classical architecture -- rich materials, emphasis on structure, symetrical and axial design. The result was an architecture of polished white marble (or more frequently, concrete painted white), buildings surrounded with arcades of white columns capped with round arches -- or a visual simulation of a columnade, if the budget or site plan wouldn't allow an actual habitable exterior space. Its most noted practioners were Edward Durell Stone and, in one of his periodic stylistic swings, Phillip Johnson; perhaps the most prominent example of the style is New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

There's a pretty stock example on Oakland in Shorewood, a bank and insurance building. It lacks the round arches, but it's got every other standard feature: tall, narrow piers in white, infilled with brown glazed brick and stingily thin windows. A openwork concrete brick wall. Globe lamps in the parking lot. A glass-encased lobby and stairwell, complete with a series of lamps artfully hung at varying heights.

Brown glazed brick! Who ever thought up such a thing? The darker materials of the infill helps it "disappear", creating the desired "arcade" effect.

Another little example stands out on on the southwest fringes of the city -- I want to say Green Bay Road, but it's been so long I don't remember for sure.

There's another little example up on Brown Deer Road at I-43, and a whole corporate campus in the style out by Brookfield Square Mall.

Overall, it's a widely under-appreciated style, particularly as it's about four decades old -- the age at which old architectural styles always look their worst to contemporary eyes. Even I can't help seeing it as a bit dry, stiff and stodgy somehow, but it also has a certain amount of beauty as well.

Milwaukee has recently lost two examples to remodelings -- a downtown office building on Wisconsin Avenue, re-skinned in 2004, and the Amtrak station (which had a neat exterior but needed a new interior in the worst way.) It's enough to make me perk up -- it would be unfortunate if all traces of the short-lived movement vanished from Milwaukee completely.

The genesis of a crime spree

2007-06-13T00:48:00.001-05:00

From the Journal-Sentinel back in March, a stunning closeup look at crime in inner-city Milwaukee.

It's a painful, depressing read. How can this happen here?

(And why are we spending billions on a misguided war on the other sided of the planet instead of solving this problem in our own backyard?)

Jazz in the Park Smothers Cathedral Square

2007-06-12T22:42:00.000-05:00

(Note: it's Tuesday night. I should have some shots of the park in overload after Thursday evening.)

It's obvious to anyone who's been there in the last few years: Jazz in the Park has outgrown its Cathedral Square home.

The weekly summertime event has become so popular that it's virtually impossible to move around in the park on Thursday evenings. I'm all for urban events that bring people together; large gatherings are part of the excitement of urban living. But in this case, there's a downside to this overwhelmingly dominant use of the park: namely, every other use of the park, every other day of the week.

Cathedral Square, as it currently stands, is definately not one of the world's great urban spaces. Heck, it's not even one of Milwaukee's finer urban moments. Oh, it's got potential, but it needs a complete makeover to reach it.

The park is not particularly inviting or friendly; it fails to provide the sense of enclosure and separation from the surrounding city that mark the best urban parks (see: Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Union Square Park in Manhattan, and the sadly-underutilized Zeidler Park in Milwaukee.) It's not a place that people seek out because it's special, but rather simply because it's convenient. On a fine lunchtime at noon, or after 5pm on a beautiful Friday, the park generally hosts only a handful of visitors. This has been my experience with the park every time I've been by it over the past six years. Unless you've got a kid on the tot lot, there's just not much reason to hang around there.

So what's the problem? At a glance, Cathedral Square Park has no internal destinations -- no central plaza, very little permanent seating, no designed space that draws people into it and invites them to linger, no sense of circulation that tempts you to wander. Even when I have taken a walk through the park, there's no sense of entry or arrival; I just reached the other side and went on my way. And it was not till I took a close look at the Jazz in the Park stage that I realized: there actually IS a fountain underneath there.

What an apt metaphor for the reduction of the park to this single use!

The walkways that do exist are shabby -- cheap and aging asphalt paths that clearly state that this is a space nobody cares about. Instead of wasting money installing special paving at intersections, why not do something like that here -- in a space that's made for pedestrians, where a fine scale of detail will actually be appreciated?

A random scattering of loose picnic tables completes the picture of Cathedral Square as a space that exists soley to serve Jazz in the Park, with all other uses being an incidental afterthought.

Cathedral Square was once Courthouse Square, a half-block plaza with the Milwaukee County Courthouse at its north end. The Courthouse was demolished long ago, but its imprint remains on the park, which was never re-designed to deal appropriately with its revised circumstances. Where the Courthouse once stood is now an undifferentiated field of grass, lined with a couple of walkways. It is neither a grand promenade, nor, with its north and east sides left open and undefined, a great lawn.

The park has a a front (the north side, along Kilbourn) and a back (the south, along E. Wells), and two sides, but it's oriented completely wrong. If there has to be a front -- and there really shouldn't be -- it should face the Cathedral. The park barely responds to the impressive Cream City brick spire, however; only the placement of the fountain seems to acknowledge it, and even it reads more like a coincidence than an intentional choice.

There should likewise be a strong response to the cluster of restaurants at the southwest corner. With its cluster of old-growth trees and outdoor restaurant seating right across the street, this is actually the nicest space in the park, but it's treated like the butt end:

The north end of the park begs for some sense of shelter and enclosure, some protection from the street parking and the rather brutal MSOE buildings across the street, which are too harsh to be cozy and yet too short to define the edge of the park's space. This edge needs shrubs, trees, half-walls, earthen enmbankments, something. The grass field doesn't have to go away; it just needs to have its borders reworked.

The point of all this is to make Cathedral Square a space that's so nice, so appealing, it becomes a destination in itself, not just a platform for an event that happens once a week for three months of the year. Such is the highest and best use of an urban park -- a place that is filled with people at all times of day, there for multiple reasons.

So where could Jazz in the Park go? My suggestions would be either nearby Veterans Park, which has no shortage of open space, or the long-languishing MacArthur Park in front of the current Milwaukee County Courthouse.

The problem with both suggestions is that the event is organized by the East Town Association, which has every reason in the world to keep it right where it is. The hordes which decend on the park every Thursday evening undoubtably bring a great deal of business to the restaurants that cluster near the park. Both of my alternative locations have almost no businesses nearby, and neither is likely to develop them any time soon.

But with Jazz in the Park regularly packed to bursting, and crushing the park under its weight, it's past time to consider options.

Passing of a Quiet Neighborhood Icon

2007-06-05T20:54:00.001-05:00

Trep-Art, the dance supply store at the corner of Park and Murray, will be closing the doors of its East Side location on June 16th.

I have absolutely no use for dance supplies, but I will fervently miss the store's colorful and creative window displays, rotated seasonally, and always stylish. The dedicated window display is a rare art in general these days, and almost unheard of for a small neighborhood specialty store. I now feel incredibly lucky to have photographed their window displays at night on a few occasions. Trep-Art adds a spot of color and variety to the block I call home -- a bit of the spice that makes city living so rich -- and its departure is a loss for the city.

Hopefully the space will not remain vacant for long. A second location in Brookfield will remain open.

Venetian Theater Demolished

2007-05-11T13:20:00.000-05:00

Word just reached me that the old Venetian Theater, a long-abandoned monolith on Center Street, was demolished at the beginning of April.

Milwaukee Renaissance has more information and photos.

Some well-wishers managed to salvage some of the beautiful terra cotta ornament, but not till after it had fallen to the ground.

Water Street Changes

2007-05-02T00:38:00.000-05:00

Lots happening along my daily commute to work...

The spectacular restoration of City Hall's facade continues; recently an enormous mobile crane was on site to do some heavy lifting, requiring a block of northbound Water Street to be shut down for several days.

The clock tower has gotten new backing (appears to be concrete but it's hard to tell from 300 feet below) in anticipation of its new terra cotta facade. Some of the brick substructure of the engaged mini-towers appears to have been put back up. At street level, the job site is an ever-shifting warehouse of pieces of terra cotta trim; thousands of them are being replaced as part of the project.

A recent Journal-Sentinel article notes some concerns about the matching of the terra cotta and brick colors.

The Terrace Bar, a tiny infill building that went up in 2003, closed its doors a while back. It's not very surprising. The flashy, cooly modern interior was distinctly at odds with the worn-wood look and casual, raucous atmosphere of the Water Street bar district; it might have done better a few blocks east among Milwaukee Street's hip, trendy dance clubs. The titular rooftop terrace sounds like a nice idea, but in actuality it's kind of an afterthought to the building -- narrow, cramped, removed from the street, not much of a view. And on top of all that, they didn't serve food.

The building's construction also appears to have worsened the tilt of Fitzgibbon's Pub next door to alarming levels.

The Terrace Bar building is slated to re-open as Tequila Rita's, which I'm sure will be a very respectable establishment! Only time will tell if the hypnotic color-changing lights will return:

At Water & Juneau, a corner long inhabited by a grungy parking lot is about to be built up as The Residences on Water, a mixed-use building with condos and a hotel:

This building could start the transformation of the bar district into an urban strip that includes both sides of the street. It certainly will improve the looks of the desolate eastern side of the street.

Exploratory drilling on the site has been going on for several days in preparation for excavation.

So far, infill in the Park East has been starting at the edges, leaving a vast void in the center. The Journal-Sentinel reports a debate between city officials who want to use public money to jumpstart development in the corridor, and owners of existing businesses who don't want potential competition to get a tax-funded leg up.

Further north, in the vacant fields where the freeway once ended, signs appeared recently announcing a development called Park East Square -- "two hotels, 400 residential units." Renderings show an ambitious and highly urban development of low- and mid-rise buildings lining the street edges.

Across the street, the old Pfister & Vogel Tannery complex remains standing, largely untouched. A few work crews have poked around it in recent months, at least one from a board-up company, and possibly another from environmental remediation.

Enterprising grafitti artists, meanwhile, have yet again tagged the water tower on top of the complex, just a month or two after the last round of tags was covered over with gray paint. The water tower is shown as being preserved in the proposed North End development, which will otherwise level the Pfister & Vogel buildings.

The new condominiums look exciting (as always, I am totally in favor of new, urban-density residential development in the city), though I will deeply mourn the loss of the brawny, articulated brick facade of the Pfister & Vogel main building.

Lastly, the Flatiron Park East is well into construction; another story has gone up since I shot this photo a few weeks ago. The project makes the most of a tight, oddly shaped site, and even utilizes the existing alley for its garage access -- avoiding one of those annoying curb cuts.

All in all, an amazing amount of urban development happening in a small area that needs it.

Park Avenue Extension

2007-04-24T18:18:00.000-05:00

Along the East Side bike path, there's construction happening alongside the Urban Ecology Center. The project is a bridge extension of Park Avenue, carrying it across the bike trail to a vacant lot on its west side.

Click for full-size image.

A sign alongside the construction site explains in great detail what's happening and why -- an admirable move, considering that many construction sites offer zero information about what they're erecting. The text is reproduced on the Urban Ecology Center's web site.

The purpose of the extension is to provide access to the empty lot pictured above, which will be transformed into a "green" 55-car parking lot to serve the park and the Center. No word on what the "green" portion entails, but as a project being driven by the Urban Ecology Center, it's bound to be something good. And an additional connection across the bike path can only help the western portion of Riverside Park become more integrated with the rest of the neighborhood, as well as bring more users into what is currently a beautiful but somewhat isolated section of the park.

Transit for Milwaukee

2007-04-15T16:16:00.000-05:00

Noticed a flyer on a bus stop this afternoon: The Milwaukee Transit Riders Union will be holding its first public meeting on Saturday, April 28 at 10:00AM at the East Library. They have some lofty and noble goals, which I wish them luck in achieving.

For me, the crux of MCTS's problem is infrequent, irregular service. When I first started working downtown, I tried taking the bus from the East Side. I'd stand outside in the freezing cold of wintertime, often waiting 15 or 20 minutes for a bus to show up -- a time during which I could easily have driven there.

In the end, I decided that if I was going to freeze my tail off for 20 minutes, I might as well be where I'm going when it's done. I started biking instead. Now I bike most of the time, drive when it's raining or below 15 degrees, and ride the bus only when it's snowing.

People would sometimes tell me, oh, you should check the schedule!

Well, no. Even if the buses actually adhered to a schedule (and in all my experience, they do no such thing), I should not have to check a schedule. I should walk out to the stop, wait a few short minutes, and have a bus arrive. That's how a functional transit system works.

You should never have to wait more than ten minutes for a bus -- and that's only if you were a block from the bus stop when the last bus went by. Anything more is an absurd imposition on your schedule, a waste of your time. MCTS would do well to consider that.

Urban Gas Station

2007-04-15T10:57:00.000-05:00

I have passed this thing at 12th and Highland a few times, and every time I'm struck by it:

It's an urban gas station.

Architecturally, it's no great shakes, though it's nice enough: clad in brick, with a second tone used to differentiate the base, and a small raised tower to mark the corner (this is about the only architectural gesture that owners can afford anymore, it seems.)

The building portion conforms to the most basic rules of the urban game: it's more than one story. It's compact. It's built out to the street edge. And even the pumping station shelter is fairly compact and efficient. Its driveways break the sidewalk once on each side.

Given the battered environment it stands in, the "urban" portion is a bit of an anomaly. It has a few urban-style neighbors to its west, but the streets around here have suffered great abuse at the hands of urban renewal and traffic engineering. Further westward, it feels like suburbia: empty and placeless. To the east, amid more suburban redevelopment, huge swaths of land have been blasted away by the Interstate.

But this one little business has taken one remarkable step towards maintaining a sense of place and location with this building that plays by the right rules.

MacArthur Square

2007-04-12T23:52:00.000-05:00

From Whitney Gould's column, planning to rework MacArthur Square.

Never heard of MacArthur Square? Not surprising. Cast your mind along 6th Street, along the western edge of downtown. Notice a void in your spatial memory around the Milwaukee County Courthouse? That's MacArthur Square, a huge open plaza atop a parking garage -- a plaza that nobody uses.

You can see it at the bottom. Notice how there's hardly any people there, despite it being a beautiful, temperate summer day.

In a nutshell, I agree with most of the ideas in the article. The plaza's far, far bigger than it needs to be, if it needs to be there at all. It's a product of City Beautiful thinking, a movement reacting to what was then an overcrowded and dirty urban environment, one starved for open space. It was brought to reality in an age where automobiles had come to dominate and where the buildings lining it were no longer the ennobling, ornate Beaux Arts structures envisioned by the likes of Daniel Burham.

Today, we're stuck with so much open space we scarcely realize how much of it there is. Yet we continue to venerate it. Call MacArthur Square "green space" and we'll be lucky to ever get rid of it. "Green space" is not automatically good; in overabundance, it is antithetical and damaging to the city.

Kill the plaza. Put the street grid back in place. Raise up some new buildings. Maybe create a much smaller open space, scaled for people instead of aerial views. Reskin --

--- wait.

That's the "bland" building they want to reskin?? Why?! It's a symphony of shadows and light, a handsome work of concrete Brutalism with some classic Mid-Century Modern details. Leave it alone! The money spent on a purely aesthetic reworking of this building could be put to far better use elsewhere.

Anyway, a reskin could end up looking like.... okay, professional interests keep me from pointing any fingers, but let's just say a contemporary reskinning is likely to give you a much better example of "bland" than this brawny work of Modernism.

The Useless Circle

2007-04-12T20:02:00.000-05:00

I've never quite understood the point of the traffic circle at the south end of the 6th Street Viaduct.

It's a vast space, designed to regulate traffic between the moderately busy 6th Street (an important surface connection between downtown and south city) and... a few unremarkable side streets. And that's it.

To accomplish this pedestrian feat, it devours an entire city block's worth of land:

Now maybe there's something going on underground that I'm not aware of, sewer lines or utilities or unstable soils or sacred Indian burial grounds, but it sure seems to me like 6th Street could've just continued straight off the viaduct.

I've likewise never understood people's fascination with traffic circles. In my experience (mostly in New Jersey), they're difficult to navigate, and harrowing for a first-time traveller. There's no way of knowing what lane you need to be in till you're already past where you wanted to go, and your circular path makes it that much harder to check behind you for someone in the lane to your right.

More to the point, the 6th Street roundabout was completely unnecessary. None of the other streets at this intersection have even moderate volumes of traffic. They could have been terminated with stop signs with no impact on traffic flow. 6th Street only get really busy at rush hour, as downtown workers use it as a longcut to the Interstate a few blocks south. It provides a very poor termination to a bridge that otherwise is all about making connections: downtown to the Menomonee Valley to the south side.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation cites a study claiming that roundabouts reduce pedestrian-vehicle accidents. Well, gee, ya don't think that could maybe be because nobody in their right mind would cross this thing on foot?! Seriously. The cold hard fact is, the Menomonee Valley is over half a mile across, and even with the beautiful new 6th Street Bridge, it's a long, lonely walk from downtown to the south side. Not many people take it on, even on the nicest of days.

This might not seem worth quibbling over, but the useless circle is taking up an entire city block on the edge of one of the most urban areas of the city. That's a block that should have buildings on it, not grass and concrete. Contrary to what traffic engineers might have you believe, there are more important things than moving traffic swiftly through town, and not sacrificing entire city blocks to auto traffic is one of them.

Confronting City Crime

2007-03-24T01:49:00.000-05:00

I've been reading with great interest the blog of James T. Harris, a Sherman Park resident and local radio show host, among other things, who writes about social and political issues and the city. He's conservative in his political and social leanings, which means I often disagree with his points to some extent, but I find his experiences interesting and his writings compelling and passionate.

Most importantly to me, he's focused on the lynchpin issue of crime in the city. This is an incredibly important matter, one that's been killing Rust Belt cities for 40 years now. It's a social disease eating away at a substantial portion of our population, damaging our neighborhoods, our cities, and contributing to the loss of historic architecture and urban environments.

To head off the current crime wave, he's advocating for flooding the streets with police officers, in a strategy not unlike what we're doing in Iraq at the moment. Unlike a lot of younger liberal-minded folks who seem to harbor a distrust of the police, I think it's a good idea. Milwaukee's police force is stretched far too thin; they need many more officers on the street, both responding to calls and doing the preemptive work of getting involved in the neighborhoods they keep watch over -- the latter a task that's had to take a back seat to emergency call response.

However, if it's the sole solution, it will never be more than a band-aid. Crime needs to be addressed at its root causes, be they poverty, joblessness, drug addiction, a pervasive culture of helplessness, apathy or entitlement, or shear malice.

Yes, there are some people who are simply bad to the core and will likely never be able to exist in society. Lock 'em up, fine. But most people are a lot less on-or-off, black-or-white than that. Give them opportunities, give them training and guidance and a supportive environment and a path to follow, and they can succeed.

And I want to see this not because I'm a bleeding-heart left wing liberal hippie (which I am) who wants to run every facet of other peoples' lives (which I don't), but because I want to live in a city where I can walk down the street at 9pm without worrying about getting mugged, where I can ride my bike through any neighborhood in town and not worry about being the wrong skin color or being viewed suspiciously every time I stop to take a photograph, where vital street life thrives, where beautiful old buildings of character and distinction are not left to deteriorate. My motives here are in part selfish.

(And in part, they are not: the poverty I've seen distresses me, and the disinvestment, disenfranchisement, and abandonment of urban neighborhoods and their residents I've seen sickens me.)

At the end of the day, we should do what works, whether that's more police presence, societal intervention, job creation, or -- most likely -- some wide-ranging combination of all these strategies and more, a multi-faceted strategy to confront a complex problem. Our decisions should be based not on social leanings or politics, but on what actually works. In a matter of such import, partisan bickering and finger-pointing is a frivolous distraction.

New on the airwaves

2007-02-28T22:51:00.000-06:00

88nine, RadioMilwaukee, started broadcasting in its new format this week. I have to wonder if Milwaukee's ready for two independent radio stations.

I'm a huge fan of WMSE, the city's alternative station for many years. They've hooked me on Americana, Latino, rockabilly, and soul, and furthered my fondness for blues, old rock, and pop of many flavors. I swear by the Chicken Shack and Way Back Home.

That said, WMSE often isn't terribly radio-friendly. Their willingness to push boundaries and expectations often means they'll play stuff that is a turn-off to someone who wants to listen to "good music" and doesn't want to hear "Hotel California" for the ten thousandth time -- be it screechy Indian pop, screaming hardcore metal, broken-voiced primative folk music, or painfully unmelodic and atonal free jazz. (WMSE has taught me to hate free jazz.)

In the evenings, Milwaukee's NPR affiliate, 89.7 WUWM, also offers music in a similar vein of "diverse but appoachable pop", but it's often rather low key and... well... boring. Saturday at the Cafe used to drive me nuts. I wanted to call them up and yell at them: "It's SATURDAY!! It's the best time of the week! It's a happy time! It's beautiful and sunny outside! PLAY SOMETHING PEPPY!!!" The syndicated World Cafe plays good music but frequently diverges into 15-20 minute interviews which get very annoying if you just want some background music. So while I appreciate WUWM, I've never fallen in love with it as I have WMSE.

This new station seems to be pushing to grab those listeners who like diversity but aren't always up for WMSE's often challenging playlists, and want a bit more zing than WUWM is willing to offer. In that, they sound much like Philadelphia's 88.5 WXPN, creators of the World Cafe. It's a format that I've long hoped would find commercial success, but I'll accept this instead.

So far, I don't think WMSE and RadioMilwaukee are really in direct competition with each other; WMSE's format focuses more on intense exploration of various genres, whereas this new station seems more about maintaining a relatively even keel, touching on a bit of this, a bit of that. It suits people who might like reggae or hip hop, but don't want to sit through three solid hours of it. They're different approaches. I just hope that it will expand the base of member-supported listeners, rather than drawing away WMSE's base.

I wonder how long Milwaukee can support two independent radio stations. Few cities are so lucky. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks.

2007-02-28T20:13:00.000-06:00

Some recent stories of interest:

- Riverwest Currents reports on progress at the North Avenue reservoir, which is being taken apart and rebuilt into park space. I drive past this thing going to and from work, and keep meaning to write something about it, but they say more than I could -- and have better photos to boot.

- A Whitney Gould column reflects on opposition to construction projects and how it can negatively impact developers' ability to do work in the city... as well as the quality of the final product.

- From the Journal-Sentinel, the 11-story condo has cleared another hurtle with approval from a review panel of the Common Council.

- From the Shepherd-Express, two differing visions of regional rail transit around Milwaukee.

2007-02-21T00:30:00.000-06:00

Blegh! I biked to work today, taking advantage of temperatures around freezing. After three weeks of temps see-sawing around zero, it felt absolutely tropical.

Sadly, there's a month's worth of muck on the roads, well-stirred by the intense humidity of melting snow. By the time I got to Brady Street, I had half of Wisconsin splattered on my bike and myself.

Also: those condos on N. Prospect still have that botched up pavement in the bike lanes, and again it nearly killed me as I headed home this evening. They've also taken up more of the lane with a construction fence and a pile of shoved-aside snow. Annoying!

Also also: Unrelated to anything urban, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band at Potawatami's Northern Lights Theater were awesome. Happy Mardi Gras!

Milwaukee's Discussion Void

2007-02-12T00:40:00.000-06:00

As I skim back over my just-posted take on a St. Louis development proposal, I'm struck by how many links I ended up putting in it. It's amazing how many people in St. Louis are already discussing it, just days after its announcement.

The contrast is stark: I challenge you to find any comparable discussion among the residents of Milwaukee. Apart from this blog, and one or two other bloggers who occasionally touch on issues of urbanism, architecture and development, there's nothing. Silence. A void. There simply is no online community discussing the physical form of Milwaukee or its future. There's Whitney Gould at the Journal-Sentinel, and then nothing.

Granted, Milwaukee can afford to rest on its laurels a bit -- our last Mayor went on to become president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. When Norquist first came to town, he saw a new Walgreens on Brady Street with a ghastly parking lot in front of it. "Why'd you build it like that??" he asked the developer. "'Cause that's what the code says we had to do!" was the answer. So he promptly set about changing the code. Then he tore down the Park East freeway; we're just starting to fill in the 16 acres of downtown land that it opened up. It's Milwaukee's poor fortune that he was unable to tear down the 794 approach to the lake and the Hoan Bridge; replacing it with a surface boulevard would have connected downtown to the 3rd Ward, to the benefit of both.

Now we see the results of all that, as urban buildings are popping up like weeds all over downtown and the East Side.

Milwaukee's damn lucky that way. In St. Lous, outdated zoning laws mean that every last bit urbanism must be fought for, tooth and claw. It's a case-by-case battle, never-ending and often lost. In Milwaukee, people complain because our neighborhood density is increasing. But we don't know how good we've got it.

"We'll never be like Chicago!"

2007-02-10T00:20:00.001-06:00

Having lived and debated both north and south of the Windy City, I have heard Chicago brought up many times as an example of how to carry out some particular aspect of urban design and planning. And without fail, somebody will pop up with the stock local pride response: "St. Louis/Milwaukee isn't Chicago! And we shouldn't try to be!"

It drives me crazy, because it completely misses the point.

Chicago, while plagued with the same problems that most Rust Belt cities must deal with, is a highly successful urban environment when compared to most American cities. It packs considerable population density across a large area, enough to support a busy and thriving mass transit system. The rail portion of that system succeeds because it runs so frequently that it's a viable alternative to driving. It's desirable not to drive because things are so dense, parking so scarce. Things are dense because a large volume of historic buildings have been preserved, and where they have been destroyed they've been replaced by buildings of greater density. It has both major chains and small local stores. It has a diversified economy, fueled by this variety of scales. It has busy street life. It has, in short, all the hallmarks of a true urban environment.

But those are not the trappings of some kind of mythical aura of Chicagoness that if emulated will turn all your citizens into zombie Bears fans. They are the basic requirements of any successful urban environment, regardless of its size. They apply across the board -- in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, and yes, in St. Louis and Milwaukee.

Build upon those things, and your city succeeds. Diminish them, work against them, allow developers to build sprawl instead of density, and your city fails.

It is not about becoming Chicago; it is about becoming an urban environment, and Chicago is the closest example one that works. Your city may never "be like Chicago" in whatever other ways you're thinking of (certainly it's unlikely to match Chicago's population), but it would do well to learn some of Chicago's lessons. They transcend any one location.

Milwaukee to Chicago and back

2007-02-04T19:46:00.001-06:00

I travel regularly between Milwaukee and Chicago, and have taken to using the train and bus options.

The newly-instituted Megabus has made non-car transit a great deal easier. Their every-few-hours schedule synchs up nicely with Amtrak's, giving travellers a wide array of departure choices.

Price-wise, Megabus stands to give Amtrak a beating. Buy your tickets the day of travel, and it's $9.50 one way; buy a month ahead, and the price drops as low as $3 to $1. Amtrak charges $21 one way, regardless of the time of purchase. $40 for a Chicago day trip has long seemed very steep to me, though perhaps because my basis for comparison is the $24 I used to pay to travel round trip from Philadelphia to New York on regional rail. The Milwaukee area's lack of a regional rail system puts it at a big disadvantage here, and Megabus is stepping in to fill the gap. Even paying for a couple of days' worth of parking at the Milwaukee train station, I still come out way ahead with the bus.

Service-wise... I've had problems with both. Megabus is of course subject to the unpredictable fluctuations of Chicago traffic, which can leave passengers standing at the curbside at length. A bus today was unable to make a return trip, causing a half-hour delay while a replacement arrived; the replacement smelt of exhaust fumes the whole trip back.

Megabus also has an annoying inconsistency with labelling their buses; sometimes a flashing marquee announces the destination, sometimes a printed board, and sometimes... nothing. Today I boarded a bus for Milwaukee whose marquee announced it was bound for Minneapolis. We had to stop and let one guy off who was on the wrong bus.

Amtrak seems just as prone to mechanical difficulties as the bus; one of my last few trips was on a train with a malfunctioning locomotive, causing it to pull in an hour late; another arrived late enough to cause me to miss a Metra connection. Conflicts with freight trains can also cause delays.

Amtrak has the clear leg up when it comes to dignity of service, with full-service stations at each end -- even though both are unfortunate products of the 1960s. The Milwaukee station was long a rather depressing iteration of Modernism:

But it is currently undergoing a complete reconstruction:

The rebuilding will provde it with a spacious, light-filled waiting area, replacing a dim, low-ceilinged, dingy space.

Chicago still retains half of its original Union Station:

That's the western half, containing its spectular Grand Hall, one of the finest public spaces in the city:

But the concourse to the east, the more heavily-used place where one actually boarded the trains, was replaced by a one-story warren in the 1960s.

The train shed beyond is singularly unremarkable, a space with absolutely no concessions to nicety, comfort or beauty:

But, at least it keeps the rain off. And the waiting areas are comfortable, if not particularly beautiful.

Megabus, by contrast, provides absolutely nothing, picking up passengers at curbside -- up the street from the Amtrak station in Milwaukee, and in the taxi drop-off area in Chicago:

The situation, already chaotic with the comings and goings of taxis, cars, and city buses, is made worst still by the enormous Coach USA buses trying to load and unload crowds of people. Megabus service to Minneapolis, Madison, St. Louis, and elsewhere also departs from here.

Amtrak in Chicago has fired a shot in response to this hijacking of their own facilities by their competition:

On a February day with a high just barely above zero, Megabus customers don't seem inclined to listen:

Time-wise... my destination is usually in northern Chicago, which means I have to catch a Metra train and backtrack a ways. All told it tends to add up to about 2.5 - 3 hours, whereas driving it can be as little as 90 minutes.

But whether I'm taking the bus or the train, I find it infinately more enjoyable than driving. When I drive I tend to arrive frazzled, tired, and stressed. When I'm riding, I can read, nap, listen to music, and arrive feeling refreshed. It's also better for the environment.

At any rate, it's good to see Megabus doing a healthy business. I figure that a lot of people would simply drive if Amtrak was their only alternative; this way, they get introduced to the convenience of mass transit, at a price that's affordable. Anything that gets cars off the highway, and promotes the usefulness of mass transit in the eyes of Milwaukee's population, can only be a good thing.

There's Still Crime in the City

2007-02-03T18:11:00.000-06:00

(Duplicate post from my St. Louis blog.)

So now I'm doin' it my way
I took the law in my hands

USA Today: Cities see crime surge as threat to their revival

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Violent crime leaps in city

Time Magazine: The Next Crime Wave

From an interview with outgoing Milwaukee chief of police Nan Hagerty:

First of all, it’s important for people to realize that, as a police department, we end up with problems that are many times created because of society. You’re talking about a lack of jobs. Years ago, there were people who could get good, family-supporting jobs in factories with very little education, work for 25 years and retire with a retirement benefit. That is when Milwaukee was the safest city in the nation. All of those jobs have left.

With those lack of jobs has come an increase in the rate of poverty, a teen pregnancy rate in Milwaukee that’s just out of this world, and, of course, all of the other things that come with that.

Same issue, the Milwaukee Shepherd-Express's response to the Time story.

From Flickr.com user Boxchain: March Against Crime in New Orleans, with some very large and very angry crowds.

In my own life, my housemate's car was stolen, someone got mugged on the street right in front of our house, a co-worker's car was broken into, two more cars on the same lot were broken into this week, and my own car has been rifled through twice in the last few months (lost my MP3 player, the only time I've left anything valuable in the car in years. Damn!!) A lady was punched in the face by a random guy a few blocks from my girlfriend's Chicago apartment. Over in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood (analogous to West Philadelphia, or to a lesser extent, Old North St. Louis), a group has started a foot patrol to help keep some eyes on the streets during peak bar hours.

People want to flee from it, run away to the suburbs, move further and further and further out, as if running away will solve the problem.

It won't. The problem always catches up, no matter how far you run.

You look around and suddenly your 1950s suburb is going down hill, the "wrong people" are starting to move in, and oh crap, it's time to leap outwards to the next ring of the peripheral exurban rim. (And hey, guess what? Scientists have just informed us that we can't afford to keep running anymore.)

The whole system is broken, just unbelievabley broken. We've created an entire underclass of unemployed people who see no prospects, no hope, no future, who have become culturally engrained to oppose anything that might resemble progress or self-improvement. Guns get tossed around like candy and fired off like firecrackers. People are just crazy out there.

And it all spirals onwards because we allow our animalistic craving for revenge, for punishment, override our human sensibility, our rational thought processes. We're locking up more people now than ever before, and can we really say it's working? Of course not. We aren't doing jack to improve these people, to give them hope, treatment, training, a path to follow once they're released, a plan, prospects, a place to go. They get back on the street and they're right back at it. What else do we actually expect them to do??

And it's killing my cities, the places that I love, the all-too-rare man-made places in America that are truly beautiful and humanizing -- not to mention the places that are our best hope for the future, the kind of places that we all need to be re-compacting ourselves into if we're ever to curb our auto-based carbon emissions so we don't wreck the entire goddamn planet and wipe ourselves out in the process. It doesn't matter if we manage to dig up any more oil or not, because the atmosphere simply can't handle our current carbon output. Technology will. not. save us. Urban, non-auto-centric living will, but don't count on our *expletives deleted* president to tell you that. Hell, no politician is ever likely to; it's not a very popular thing to say. It would actually challenge people to change their life styles.

The cities are our future -- as a nation, as a civilized society, as a species. They must be fought for, defended, with both determination and intelligence. They must be rebuilt to accomdate all our population, not just the rich or the poor or the people inbetween. I'd really hope that we might be able to save a few old buildings in the process, because so much of what we build today just isn't very nice to look at compared to what we built a hundred years ago... but in the end that's less important than heading off a global catastrophe and maybe building some cities that are actually good places to walk, work, play, and live in... without a space-consumptive, carbon-spewing automobile.

Coffee Shop for Sale

2007-01-04T21:20:00.000-06:00

Node, the 24-hour coffee shop on North Avenue, closed at the end of December. The space is for sale.

If a 24-hour place can't cut it on the East Side, where can it?? Kinda makes you wonder.

I only visited the place a few times myself; I liked the homey atmosphere, but there wasn't much in the way of the sweet stuff I tend to favor (cake, cider, frappuccinos, etc) so I never became a regular. My loss, I suppose.

The Sentry Foods site, nearly empty

2007-01-02T19:48:00.000-06:00

The wreckers have just about wrapped up demolition of the old Sentry Foods site, as well as the adjoining Ben Franklin store (I think that's what it was; the place was closed before I ever came to Milwaukee.) The photos below are from a couple of weeks ago, when some of the latter building was still standing, but they get the point across: this is an enormous site.

It is infuriating to think that nothing but a Walgreens is going to go on this very large, very lucrative site. Even with a large store, it seems obvious that a huge parking lot is going to be filling the leftover space.

At last, those poor UWM students won't have to cross the impenetrable barrier of Locust Street to reach a Walgreens. Boy howdy, that's progress!

Now, I'm not totally opposed to the idea of a Walgreens here. What if they did something like this?

That's the 1938 Walgreens, still in business, on Canal Street in downtown New Orleans. That astonishing neon ensemble makes it a tourist attraction, and a place where I happily spent my dollars on a previous visit to the city. The scale is perfect for Oakland Avenue, and the style? It's impeccable!

Somehow, though, I have a sneaking suspicion that we aren't going to get that.

More details on the former plans at OnMilwaukee.com.

Edit: Boy, talk about a post being a day late. An evening constitutional took me past the site just now; it turns out that footings have already been poured for the new Walgreens building.

It sits on the northern half of the cleared lot, separated from the apartment building next door by about an alley width. It does indeed come out to the sidewalk -- kudos for that. This leaves the southern half of the lot as a parking lot, and while that kinda sucks, at least the design leaves enough space for something more appropriate to the site, such as a building. After all, parking lots can be easily torn out.

11-story condo teardown photos

2007-01-02T19:03:00.000-06:00

The four houses on the site of the condo at Stowell and Webster:

All four houses show extensive signs of deferred maintenance. Most have padlocks on the doors. The corner house is impressively massive; the northernmost one has some nice architectural ornament. The two in the midde have been covered with some unfortunate asphalt shingle siding.

More photos at Flickr.com.

11 Story Condo near Downer Ave.

2006-12-19T23:10:00.000-06:00

I'm always a little slow following these things, so it's kinda old news, but plans are in the works for an 11-story condominium tower, just west of the Starbucks/Harry Schwartz Bookstore on Downer. The building will take down 4 existing houses on N. Stowell Avenue, just north of E. Webster Place, in addition to one that was destroyed for a development proposd for the site some years ago. I will be photographing those houses the first chance I get, which unfortunately probably won't be for a couple of weeks. An aerial view of the site may be viewed at Google Maps.

Much has been written about the project, online and elsewhere; yard signs have sprouted around the East Side both for and against ("No 11 story condo" and something along the lines of "YES to developing Downer Avenue").

Three renderings of the project can be found at OnMilwaukee.com. It looks like a good building, a cut above the norm for a condo tower. Still, at that scale, I worry it will overpower the neighborhood. The area hardly has any claim to historic congruity; gabled duplexes are dotted among apartment buildings from the 1920s and 1960s in a variety of scales. But almost all of the apartment blocks are four stories or fewer. The only towers in the area are a single apartment building at the southern edge of the neighborhood, and the distant buildings of Columbia-St. Mary Hospital. Inserting a high rise into the middle of the area will definately alter its flavor.

It's easy to get alarmed about change of that nature; I could see it as analogous to a Georgetown in Washington DC, or one of Chicago's many vital neighborhoods, where historic survivors stand shoulder-to-shoulder with numerous newer buildings. Such neighborhoods can be vital, exciting places to work and live... but they can also conflict with the sleepy, pleasant aura that much of East Side exudes in its present condition.

I was a little shocked by this quote, from the UWM Post blog:

[New Land Enterprise's Tim] Gokhman sees as vital to development on the East Side. He also believes that this project could revitalize an important segment of the neighborhood.
“It’s important to infuse life back into the Downer Avenue district.”

Infuse life into one of the most successful, vital, and active commercial strips in the city? The center of a busy, healthy, well-to-do neighborhood? I've always been under the impression that many of the strip's problems come from the whimsical demands of certain landlords, rather than a lack of willing tenants.

Anyway.

New Land Enterprises has, according to their web site, been responsible for some of the best condo developments on the East Side and downtown in recent years. It's a shame we can't hook them up with the former Sentry site on Oakland Avenue!

Edit, 2/05/07: The houses may be seen in this post. It's a moot point, however, because they were all demolished in the first weeks of January. The site is now empty. No salvage appears to have occurred, an incredible waste considering the materials this sort of building is typically made of.

Future teardowns?

2006-12-18T23:24:00.000-06:00

I found time this weekend to get out and photograph the two houses that face the threat of demolition by their new owner, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.

2005 E. Kenwood Blvd:

2009 E. Kenwood Blvd:

Both shots link back to more photos at my Flickr account.

More has already been written about these homes than I could ever do; I will simply state that I feel that tearing them down will damage the block and the neighborhood.

On the flip side, I can sympathize with MJF. It's nearly impossible to find an empty lot for construction on the East Side. But surely there are better candidates for demolition than these two.

2006-12-17T22:04:00.000-06:00

Holy Family Catholic Church, in Whitefish Bay.

Built in 1969, it's a delightful collection of funky ideas and common Mid-Century design elements, assembled with a sure and steady hand. Its time period can be identified, but it's not dated.

The stained glass is very restrained in its color pallette, mostly in muted tones of yellows, browns, and purples. The effect is decorative but not overwhelming.

But the centerpiece element is a curved wall punctured by a couple dozen porthole windows, filled with stained glass:

It's a creative interpretation of the massive stained glass windows that often appear behind the church alter. And as the sun travels across it, the curves and shadows change and play across each other to delightful effect. Love it!

Auto theft

2006-11-27T22:55:00.000-06:00

My housemate's car was stolen off the street in front of our house, presumably by some asshole. It's a white Honda Civic hatchback, 1991, with a trailer hitch, a bunch of plastic toys on the dashboard, and a Russ Feingold sticker on the back. If by chance you've seen it, drop me a line.

Car theft and vandalism is one of the great banes of modern urban living. Cars are incredibly vunerable; it only takes a split second and a heavy rock to inflict several hundred dollars worth of damage -- usually in pursuit of a car stereo that will fetch only a fraction of that when sold.

I personally have become somewhat detached from my car emotionally; I view it as a necessity, but not a source of great personal pride or investment. I can afford to do this, as it's generally more of a convenience than a necessity (though reaching a Target in the winter would be a bitch without it.) My suburban friends are utterly baffled by my relative non-reaction to the times my car has been violated; I can only assume they regard their vehicles as sacrosanct, sacred.

I guess I would too if I had no other way to bring home the groceries.

East side updates

2006-11-22T00:02:00.000-06:00

ITEM: The wreckers have started hitting the old Sentry Foods on Oakland. They're maybe 1/4th of the way through it as of this evening.

And in a brazen affront to the neighborhood, Walgreens will not be constructing a full apartment building, just their own store. The obvious conclusion is that the apartments were always a myth, a lure to get the powers-that-be to go along with tearing down the Sentry.

With the competition of Sentry's removed, Walgreens will be much closer to a lockup on neighborhood grocery foot traffic. Without a full multi-use building going up, it is far more likely that the new Walgreens will be a chain-standard, single-use, single-story building with a large parking lot, degrading the public realm of the Oakland Avenue commercial district. The chain has taken away our neighborhood grocery store, and in return they will give us a worse environment than we had before.

ITEM: I'm pleased to report construction activity at three of the tear-down sites I wrote about earlier. Foundation walls have been poured at the N. Warren site (north of Brady) and the Cambridge & Irving site (also north of Brady, near the North Ave. Dam.) Excavation has begun at the N. Cramer & Greenwich site, near the East Side Library.

ITEM: Signs have appeared around UWM's campus, wanting to "Save 2005 and 2009 Kenwood", referring to a pair of handsome, sturdy-looking single-family homes at Kenwood and Prospect that are in danger of demolition. Their new owner, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, wants to tear them down to construct a new Hillel Center.

The Milwaukee Historic Preservation Commission has conducted a review of the two buildings, which are part of a lineup of similarly-styled houses all built by the same builder.

The report details the architectural and historic significance of the houses at length, but even disregarding that, their demolition should be opposed on grounds of urban design and planning. The brutal, inhuman segment of UWM's campus that faces the houses is somewhat mitigated by the intimate scale of the residential buildings on the south side of Kenwood, which can also provide badly needed East Side housing. Their integrity should not be degraded.

Chicago Subterranian Warren Station

2006-11-16T23:50:00.000-06:00

Unlike New York City, which demolished its spectacular Penn Station in the early 1960s and replaced it with a forgettable rat's maze of dimly lit underground passages, Chicago still retains a grand central rail terminal:

My question, then, is: why aren't they using it?

I mean, okay, maybe I don't pass through during peak hours, and maybe it's jammed then. But the times I have been through -- early evening, generally -- are still pretty busy times, but there ain't a soul hanging out in this place. Instead, passengers must wait in the uninspiring confines of a network of bland hallways that doesn't have much on the awful Penn Station that replaced the original.

Maybe it's the complete and utter lack of seating? Why aren't there benches and boarding signage, so you can wait in a place that's digified? Why wasn't the station configured to use this magnificent space as the main entrance and exit, instead of a side door that only a few people come across by chance?

(The answer, of course, is that the original concourse -- a spacious, airy, light-filled place -- was demolished in 1969 so some awful office towers could be built on its site. This was sold to the public as "modernizing" the station.)

Bike Lane surprise

2006-11-16T10:41:00.000-06:00

When I bike, I ride fast. I cruise at 15-20mph, and downhill or with the wind behind me, I can sometimes hit 25-30mph. On many city streets, that's comparable to the speed of traffic.

It also means that if something goes wrong, it can potentially go very, very wrong.

Something nearly went wrong Tuesday night as I biked home from work, northbound on Prospect. As I passed the construction site of the Park Lafayette condo tower, the handy bike lane suddenly gave way to a number of rough, irregular black asphalt patches. This being the season of early sunsets, it was dark, of course; I had no idea what I was about to hit. With a wall of cars moving alongside me, going around wasn't an option. I slammed on the brakes ahd held on tight. My U-lock came flying off its mounts on one of the bumps but otherwise I survived.

I hope they'll fix these patches soon -- they're dangerous!

2006-10-16T21:37:00.000-05:00

test

UWM Dorm opposition

2006-10-03T20:31:00.000-05:00

The sign shown below cropped up in front of a couple of East Side houses some time in the last few days:

It's a potent symbol of an unfortunate trend on the East Side: general opposition to the presence of UWM students.

Columbia-St. Mary's is moving out of the multi-building hospital complex that stands across the street from UWM's landlocked and desparately overcrowded campus. The conclusion is logical: UWM should take it over and use it for dorms and classroom space. But homeowners in the area seem prepared to take up arms against it.

Opposing the deal is a bad, bad idea.

The first thing that one has to remember is: the University was here first. Its original incarnation was here before the neighborhood itself, and its current form was here long before most of the East Side's residents. To move to the East Side and then fight against the presence of students is counterintuitive, to say the least.

Second, UWM students drive a huge portion of the neighborhood's economy. They provide steady and reliable rent to local landlords. They support the stores, theaters, bars, clubs and restaurants which provide the area with its urbanity; their presence is the backbone of the neighborhood's street life. If the East Side is a good thing, then more students will only make it better.

Local homeowners seem to have two basic concerns: parking, and noise. Ironically, putting dorms in the old hospital will help relieve both those problems.

On cars: Students who live in dorms don't need them. Their social life is right on campus; they don't have to travel to classes or to eat. This is especially important since dorm space on campus is already so limited; a bulk of students only live in the dorms for their first year, if at all. After that, they're either living in the neighborhood or commuting in from elsewhere -- both of which tend to bring more cars into the neighborhood. UWM is already a commuter-heavy campus; anything which can reduce that is good for streets of the East Side which are already crowded with parked cars.

On noise: Putting students on campus provides them with some geographic isolation from the neighborhood. I have students partying in the alley behind my house every September, and it's not the end of the world; however, their numbers might be reduced if more of them were living on campus. Keeping students off campus is likely to increase noise in the neighorhoods; more on-campus dorms -- as well as open and reasoned dialogue between residents, students, and the university -- will reduce it.

Capping enrollment at UWM ties the hands of the instution and harms the city as a whole. It will not solve any of the existing problems between UWM and its neighborhood, and by curtailing the density of the neighborhood, it will limit the East Side's ability to reach its full potential as an urban environment. Turning the hospital campus over to the university for dorms and classrooms is the best and highest use of the land and buildings.

Tear-downs coming to the East Side?

2006-09-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

In the last month, I've noticed three vacant lots that, though I never actually photographed or took particular notice of what was on them, definately had houses on them; in each case, I got that strange feeling that something had changed, even though I couldn't recall exactly what; I suspected they were probably just typical wood-sided gable-fronted Milwaukee houses. A careful purusal of Google Maps' satellite views of the city confirms it.

Tear-down #1 in this list was a lot north of Brady Street, on N. Warren Avenue; it came down last summer and has remained vacant since. The satellite view isn't quite clear enough to say for sure but it looks like a small house. Could be a garage, though. A parking lot stood along side it.

Tear-down #2 is on N. Cramer Street, diagonally across from the East Side library's parking lot. Again the satellite is a little unclear but the best guess is a gabled house.

Tear-down #3 was a gabled house on N. Cambridge Avenue, where it twists and turns to meet E. Irving Place. Ceasar's Park and the North Avenue Dam are right around the corner.

Tear-down #4 was also a gabled house; it stood on Humbolt, just north of the laundromat on Brady Street.

Is this enough to constitute a trend? Combined with at least one other demolition on Brady Street last year, I'd say... probably. Should East Siders start worrying about the character of their blocks, of their neighborhood? Tear-downs are the next logical step once all the vacant land is filled up, and often before it's filled up.

I'm not opposed to new construction, and I'm all for increased density, but I can't help twitching when hundred-year-old houses get knocked down.

Milwaukee Mid-Century: 2 on North Avenue

2006-08-05T18:50:00.000-05:00

Continuing the string of Mid-Century Mod buildings I've been posting on my other blog...

These two are very symptomatic of the inattention paid to Mid-Century Modernism in this day and age. Five years ago when I moved here I wouldn't have given either one a second glance. Now I look and see unique, creative designs, beautiful details, delightful colors and materials. They're quiet and unobtrusive until you look closer... well, as unobstrusive as a blue building can be, anyway.

The Continental Savings Bank features a grand corner entrance that wonderfully acknowledges its location on a major East Side intersection with a wall of rough rounded stones, which curves away to provide a mini-plaza space. Something once stood in front of the entry -- a fountain, perhaps, or a bench and flagpole. Sharp details include the hyper-stylized door pulls, the glazed brick logo on the west side of the building, the limestone cornerstone, and the triple mullions at the windows.

A block to the east stands a building sheathed with a distinctive blue brick; it was until recently the Prospect Medical Clinic. The blue brick building lacks the grand statements of the bank, but the unusual brick and the offset window patterns on the east and west walls make it noteworthy. Silver racing stripes form decorative patterns on several of the first floor windows and doors.

With the clinic's closure (perhaps due to the consolidation of Columbia St. Mary's across the street), a sign has appeared on the building advertising the land as being available for redevelopment. With a long-vacant gas station right next door and a parking lot behind, there is a strong chance the building's future is in doubt. Developers are no doubt salivating over the prospect of combining all three parcels and replacing them with a single large building in this lucrative location.

Big cities don't need big roads.

2006-08-05T16:39:00.000-05:00

Milwaukee loves its big streets.

The little downtown street where I sometimes park runs for only 3 blocks, ending at the Performing Arts Center on one end and the new McKinley Avenue on the other. Yet it's wide enough for parking on both sides and at least 3 lanes of traffic. Why's it gotta be so huge?

McKinley Avenue is an egregious offender in this regard -- and doubley so because of its origins. It sprang up to replace the demolished Park East Freeway, a reduntant, dead-end highway that was blissfully removed in 2002. Milwaukee's then-mayor John Norquist saw the grand urban opportunity presented by freeing up a 16-acre chunk of land right next to downtown, and after some years of effort was able to get taken out. The plan is to turn this land into a continuation of downtown's urban, pedestrian-friendly environment.

Why, then, the first step was to run in a freeway-width "avenue" is somewhat baffling. When it meets Water Street -- Milwaukee's biggest bar district -- it is 6 lanes wide. Cars fresh off the highways, reacting naturally to the preponderance of space, come roaring in from the west at fifty or more miles per hour. Woe betide the pedestrian who must cross this vast gulf of concrete. You better run fast!

Let me reiterate a fact in that last paragraph: drivers will set their own speed not based on posted speed limits, but on how fast they feel they can safely drive. Build a wider road, and you will get faster traffic. Line a road with parallel parking and a bike lane, and you will get slower traffic.

Another oddly wide street is the short stretch of North Avenue between the reservoir and the river, just west of the East Side. For some reason, after a lengthy run as a mostly 1-lane road runnning through a dense residential area, the road widens to two lanes just west of Humbolt. Then it widens still further as it runs down the hill and across the river:

Drivers, of course, go roaring down the hill at near-freeway speeds.... only to abruptly hit the breaks after crossing the river, where the road (back down to one lane) is narrowed by a traffic-calming island, forcing drivers to slow down to more pedestrian friendly speeds as they enter North Ave's busy bar district.

Why they didn't just make a left turn lane at Humbolt and keep the road at one lane with parking is beyond me.

Village Ghetto Land

2006-07-24T21:47:00.000-05:00

On the way home this afternoon, I routed through lower NW Milwaukee -- up 42nd Street to Capital, then south and east on side streets. Some thoughts:

- Is NW Milwaukee in a state comparable to St. Louis's north side 30 years ago? It's almost entirely black, appears poor, and is teaming with people hanging out on the streets. Based on my rapid windshield observations, there seem to be the social networks that pervade functional urban areas, but like St. Louis in 1970, crime is pervasive and decay is spreading. I saw two fresh burnouts. I'm starting to notice more abandoned buildings. It took me a long time to recognize these areas as a ghetto, but they really are, even if they lack the abject abandonment that marks so many St. Louis neighborhoods.

- How can such a vast area, such a large *population*, go so totally unnoticed by *everyone*? How can such vast stretches of decay be allowed to continue? How can land so close to the rising values at the city core be allowed to crumble? How can such incredible concentrations of poverty be allowed to persist?

- I passed by what appeared to be a major crime scene. A LOT of cops were gathered around some house on a side street, lots of vans and cars with lights flashing. A scattered crowd was watching from the surrounding blocks. Around the corner, a policeman was restraining a young man by the arm.

Gina used to tell me tales of listening to the police scanner at night and hearing innumerable "shots fired" reports from the neighborhoods west of Hampton. Moriya reports that after nearly being assaulted by a crazy drunk dude in broad daylight, and after having shots fired on her block at night, the police still didn't show up.

We can launch space shuttles into orbit and bring them back to Earth, but we can't tame our own cities. We can't do anything about people who have so devalued life that they will kill someone in a moment of passion. We can't provide an environment, physical and cultural, that makes these people realize how damaging their own actions are to themselves and everyone around them. We can't instill hope in thousands upon thousands of city residents.

And 95% of America either doesn't know or doesn't give a shit.

I'm not even sure if it's really conscionable to be worrying about architecture in these neighborhoods when such gross poverty is on the loose. Fighting that poverty is the only hope for the thousands of declining buildings in those neighborhoods, but it's such an enormous web of entangled causes and effects I barely know how to start grasping it, let alone finding solutions.

All I know is, if Milwaukee doesn't want its lower northwestern reaches to end up looking like St. Louis Place, somebody -- a lot of somebodies -- better start doing something soon.

Farewell Sentry's

2006-07-12T19:48:00.000-05:00

Sentry's Foods on N. Oakland is closed.

I'll miss the convenience of it. It was a five minute walk from my front door, mine and thousands of others in the blocks around me. There are other options, including a corner store right on our block, but nothing as close, cheap, and large.

I can't say I'll miss the store itself all that much. It was a 1950s-era building which probably wasn't terribly glamorous when new, and today is a beat-up, remuddled mess in need of a major overhaul. The selection was so-so, the produce was lacking, and the parking lot was a visual blight on the neighborhood.

The Sentry and its vacant adjoining neighbor will be torn down. The Walgreens that is currently 2 blocks south will put up a new building on Sentry's parking lot, with apartments on top. A parking lot will replace Sentry's location. Some sort of deli is apparently taking Walgreen's old location.

It's kind of a lateral move for the neighborhood, at best. With a Subway's and a Cousin's on opposite corners, we've already got a source for cheap sub sandwiches. We've already got a fine Walgreens. The addition of new apartments is a good thing in a neighborhood that is flooded with students, as is removing a surface parking lot. But unless the new building is large enough to reach all the way to the Cousin's building at Oakland, it will just mean the surface parking gets shuffled around. Hopefully Walgreens' inevitable surface lot will be as small and unobtrusive as their current one.

East Side Overview

2006-07-12T19:32:00.000-05:00

Having lived nearly 6 years in Milwaukee, I am firmly convinced that my East Side neighborhood is the finest in the city.

It is the most walkable, the most historically intact, the most charming, has the most active streets, and is one of the few places in town where you can get by without a car relatively easy (not that I've done the latter.)

It's also a safe neighborhood. Yes, we have some crime. My car's been broken into 3 times in the last two years (a result of parking it in a dark alley spot. We put up a motion sensor light and nobody's touched it since... knock on wood.) There have been hold-ups, rapes, even a murder a couple of years back. But those are outstanding incidents precisely because they are so rare. Our crime is generated by outsiders. The worst offenses from people living here are drunken college students knocking over your trash can late at night.

The East Side is certainly a haven for college students, and anyone who doesn't realize this and accept it right from the start is a goddamn fool. The city's largest university is located here, and thousands of students flood the neighborhood's prolific rental housing every fall. Far from being the detriment that some people make them out to be, these students are the lifeblood of this neighborhood. They give it the biggest portion of its pulse and vigor. They sustain its nightlife, they support the bars and restaurants and the two (three until recently) movie theaters, they bring life to the sidewalks and parks. Without them, the East Side would be as dull as Shorewood, the lovely but uninspiring well-to-do inner suburb to our north.

But certain residents, and in particular our Alderman Michael D'Amato, seem to view the student population as a nuisance at best, and perhaps an actual threat. I have heard more than once that D'Amato simply won't talk to students about their concerns. He has supported parking measures that range from the obnoxious to the Draconian, the most absurd of which is the requirement that cars on the street must be moved once every 24 hours. This rule is city-wide, actually, but nowhere is it more vigorously enforced than the East Side. When I lived a block away from campus, I had to make a daily trek past my parked car to wipe off the chalk marks which the city's fleet of parking checkers leave on tires to track vehicle movement.

But these are minor concerns in the grand scheme of things. The East Side is a wonderful place, and located less than a mile from the lakefront to boot. I can't imagine living anywhere else in this town.