Amtrak vs. My Bike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.