Milwaukee has a countless places where the fabric has been disrupted. I have selected three potential sites for my thesis project. They are located around the 5th Ward and Walker’s Point. I selected this region because it was one of the major historic industrial areas, but it has been overlooked for gentrification. Other major historic industrial areas in Milwaukee include the 3rd Ward, and the Menomonee Valley. The 3rd Ward underwent major revitalization in the 1990s and continues to be a popular place to redevelopment and has turned residential and commercial rather than industrial. The Menomonee Valley has undergone a slower transformation, but continues to be an industrial area being gradually redevelopment. As a result, I searched other areas and located the three sites which saw industry leave and have not returned. The three sites possess numerous characteristics which will make them strong and successful. All have ready access to roads, railways and water. Transportation is the key to industry, and originally manufacturing developed along waterways and railway corridors to take advantage of the means of moving goods.
Solvay Coke and Gas Company
The first site is the former Solvay Coke and Gas Company. The site is located along Kinnikinnick Avenue flanked by the harbor to the east, the river to the south and the Amtrak rail corridor to the west. The only access is on Greenfield Avenue. Originally named Milwaukee Coke and Gas, it was incorporated in 1902. Solvay supplied Milwaukee with gas for gas lights and produced coke for steel production. At its peak, Solvay operated as many as 200 coke ovens 24 hours a day turning millions of tons of coal into coke and gas. A portion of the site was also used for tanning. The plant was shuttered in 1983 and mostly demolished between 2003 and 2005. The office building, machine shop and other small structures remain, but the building containing the coke ovens has been reduced to a pile of rubble with only the two partially demolished smokestacks remaining.
As can be expected with a heavy industrial and tanning use, the site is heaving contaminated with mercury, arsenic, cyanide and cancer-causing polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons. The contamination is spread over the entire site and the silt along the Kinnikinnick River has buried contaminates and has a ‘no anchor’ rule as to not stir it up. A Superfund Alternative Site, the ‘brownfield’ will require enormous clean-up before it is able to be reused.
The site exchanged hands a number of times in the 1990s and 2000s with the intent to turn the site into residential use, the most recent proposal had 14, 20 story towers valued at $1.5 billion. Seemingly with each new owner, more of the site was removed, but nothing is replaced. 2004 saw the removal of the main gas facility, which was done negligently and haphazardly and resulted in the release of asbestos into the environment and left within the rubble on the site, earning a $275,000 fine. The current owner, Golden Marina Causeway, LLC, seems disinterested in doing anything with the site and is tax delinquent. Recently, the city ordered one of the buildings to be razed as it was a place for vagrants to do drugs. For all intents and purposes, the site is abandoned and given the current economic situation it is unlikely to be redeveloped for residential use.
I propose to maintain the industrial context with a project which preserves the remaining office building and perhaps the smokestack and reinvents the site for a new purpose. The site would also make connections to the south side across the Kinnikinnick River, to the west across or under the railway corridor, and to the east with a new harbor area.
Reed Street Yards
The second site is located along the Menomonee River canals adjacent to the new Harley-Davidson Museum. The former Reed Street Yards is a completely vacant site formerly used as a railway freight yard for over a hundred years. The site is flanked by recent redevelopments in the 5th Ward along the east and south sides, by the Menomonee River and Harley-Davidson Museum on the north, and the 6th Street Viaduct on the west.
The Reed Street Yard site was also slated for various redevelopment projects but nothing has taken shape. Unlike Solvay, there is little to no site contamination, no buildings to demolish and few other challenges to immediate development with the site. Given the nearby residential and commercial, the industrial use for the site would have to be noiseless and not produce any other ill effects which would disturb the neighbors. The Reed Street Yards enjoy connections to existing roadways, proximity to new development, as well as a rail corridor and waterway. Connections to the Harley plot across the river are likely, as well as improving access to the 6th Street viaduct.
Washington Street Interlocking
The third site is more ambiguous than the other two. It is roughly called the Washington Street Interlock and encompasses the area bound by South Water Street on the east, the Amtrak railway on the west, Florida Street on the north and Washington Street on the south. The site formerly was the location of a major crossroads of rail lines from the Milwaukee Road and the Chicago and Northwestern rail lines. The C&N entered from the south-east and exited the north-west in the 3rd Ward, and the Milwaukee Road entered from the south and exited to the north-east to downtown and the Menomonee Valley. The area between this triangular form was used as a yard, called the Florida Yards terminating at Florida Street. The area saw very heavy rail traffic for over 100 years as it was the primary route to Chicago. Today it has been broken up into a number of different uses. The railway corridor, formerly the Milwaukee Road is now operated by the Soo and carries Amtrak traffic to the Milwaukee Intermodal Station and freight to the Menomonee Valley. The former C&N line is abandoned. The north branch now is the parking lot for Summerfest and the Italian Community center and the rest of the line north was ripped up to become a bike trail running past the Art Museum north through the East Side. The south branch passes by the Solvay site and exits into Bay View.
The site is now used for light industrial by J Marchese Fruits and Usinger Sausage. Seemingly abandoned warehouses exist on the north end and marina buildings along the river. Of the three sites, the Washington Street Interlocking has the most existing buildings and infrastructure and is closest to existing industrial developments in the 5th Ward.
