A simple proposal for Cathedral Square

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

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.

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!"

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.