Cities have a tough time. Moviemakers create apocalyptic visions of urban desperation, chaos and decay. The nostalgically inclined see cities as places where grandfather had his first store and mom and dad went to the movies Downtown.
While Milwaukee’s suburbs grew over the past 50 years, few residential developers dared to build housing Downtown. Nothing new seemed to happen in the city center other than well-intentioned though hapless redevelopment projects like Grand Avenue mall. There was no reason for anyone to want to live in the city. So Milwaukee made laws forcing its employees to stay here. The virtues of urbanity lapsed from consciousness.
Then a residential real estate boom surprised everyone, including the most sanguine and idealistic promoters of city living. Developers are fiercely competing to build on empty lots the city could not give away just a few years ago. For the first time in our lifetime, suburbanites are fighting for Downtown condos. Population density is increasing in Milwaukee after declining for decades.
This unforeseen burst of activity signals a tectonic shift in the way we think about urban life. The issue of suburbs vs. the city is no longer a theoretical discussion among urbanists at mayors’ conferences. There is nothing academic about a precipitous rise in land values. Developer Barry Mandel bought lots in Downtown Milwaukee in 1988 for $50,000. Today, he says, similar lots cost $1 million.
This change of heart and mind has been duly recorded in the buildings of the last two decades. Milwaukee’s residential architecture has been rapidly evolving more innovative forms that celebrate rather than defend themselves from city life.
The first dwellings built for the middle class in Milwaukee in the last two decades expressed all of the worse suburban fears and anxieties. Early developments assumed that suburbanites would move to the city under two conditions: if their condo was identical to the one they left in Bayside or if they lived in a bastion that protected them from the contingencies of the city street.
1123 North Edison, built in 1984, is a pristine example of what materializes when suburban architecture is transplanted to a city lot. If this kind of development continued unabated, there’d be no reason to write this article. We’d all be living in suburbs.
Urban planners talk about how buildings like these “turn their back to the street.” In any social situation, turning your back on anyone is usually a rude gesture. In a city, manners matter for people and buildings. They either add to the geniality of the whole or not.
“Turning your back to the street” doesn’t apply in the suburbs. Unlike cities, which are layered with multiple points of view, suburbs start from a blank slate and develop into discrete worlds suspended in an undifferentiated carpet of sprawl. Nature is privatized. Streets are configured in culs-de-sac to minimize connections to the outside world. The suburbs are essentially solipsistic. There is nothing to turn your back on. Privacy is not an issue because the “public” has been eliminated.
In a city, one is part of something larger than just your lot in life. Cities are really large inhabited sculptures of endless complexity and invention. Cities are for people who learn together how to live.
Unlike the suburbs, cities have to find ways to draw a line to balance our interests in private and public life. The nature of these lines changes with the times. How they are drawn is a measure of our civil intelligence.
That intelligence was at a pretty low level when Yankee Hill was built on East Kilbourn in 1986. Layered brick walls form a visual solid. Square turrets symbolically patrol the area. Yankee Hill looks and acts like a bunker designed to withstand any imaginable hostility from the street. The line between the public and the private is harshly drawn, encapsulating the complex in an impermeable psychological barrier.
When the line between public and private is this severe, it makes no difference which side of the fence you are on. With just a few modifications, Yankee Hill could be flipped inside out and turned into a prison (as other forts were). This kind of architecture is more appropriate for the occupied West Bank of Palestine than for a relatively low crime zone in a mid-size city in America.
Thankfully, this urban kind of development is now archaic and illegal in Milwaukee. As more people moved into the city, the line between public and private began to soften and become more diaphanous. Or perhaps it’s the other way around – more and more people moved to the city because the housing was less paranoid. Buildings have a lot to say about where they are. As the line between private and public relaxes, the value of the whole increases.
Unlike the suburbs, which achieve privacy by minimizing the public, the virtue of a city is the proximity of public and private life. The idea is to draw a line that enhances the potential energy of both.
But there are some odd tics. While the demarcations are less defensive, there are still nettlesome reminders of the self-loathing of urban housing of the past.
For example, at 824 East Ogden, built in 1991, a wrought-iron fence obstructing passage between the building and the street seems vestigial. Why can’t this passage be direct and more embracing? Surely there is a more elegant design solution that pushes out and defines a clearer private/ public line closer to the street.
Similarly, consider the decorative impediment around 1110 E. Ogden, completed in 1999. A spiky fence defines a cramped and uninhabitable green space encircling the complex. Green spaces are often luxuries in cities; why design one that no one can enjoy? While this remnant of corporate landscaping is more pleasant than broken glass or barbed wire, it feels stilted and gratuitous.
These projects have their awkward and strained moments, but they are an enormous advance. The mood of urban housing shifted from anxious to ambivalent. It was only a matter of time before the next step, a fully realized contemporary vision of living in a city.
Vetter Denk’s Beerline development, still under construction on North Commerce Street, has done away with the artifacts of a suburban gated community. The spaces between the resident and the street are animated and inhabitable. These dwellings have a gracious kinship with the street.
Gone are the suburban knickknacks that decorate other townhouses around town, the faint echoes of the past, the nostalgic gentility of iron fences and corporate landscaping. In their place is a taut modern structure where everything counts. The volumes and materials are seamlessly brought together into an arresting facade that is visually complex and multidimensional. Given the rigor of the structure, the informal outdoor living areas are unexpectedly relaxed.
These buildings are a hybrid, much like some contemporary music. They fluently unify two distinct sensibilities – the austere angularity of modernists’ lines and rectangles with the coziness of bungalows. This building fits like a casual Armani jacket.
Here is a thoroughly contemporary building for those who think design matters. People who love their Apple computer, carry a Prada handbag and need a place to put an Eames chair next to their Noguchi lamp now have a place to live in Milwaukee.
It has been a long journey for Milwaukee from empty lots to architecture that is re-imagining urban life.
The first phase of the Beerline condos sold out prior to breaking ground. Before completion, the market pushed the unit values up nearly 25 percent. According to John Vetter, the buyers of his townhouses are very “sophisticated and well-traveled, cosmopolitan and interested in the arts.”
Cities are engines for invention, attracting creative people who demand more cosmopolitan amenities like interesting restaurants and stores. And so a new cycle of innovation begins.
Many cities are experiencing a version of what is happening in Milwaukee. But the evolution we have seen from suburban to authentic urban architecture was not inevitable.
After decades of suburban development, there is little shared knowledge and experience that would naturally lead to quality urban architecture. For example, consider The Reserve, a new complex just over the city line on State Street in Wauwatosa. It sets itself against its environment with high fences, a moat of parking lots, a locked gate.
Though its brochure says it’s “a natural extension of one of Milwaukee’s finest neighborhoods,” The Reserve is too generic to be part of anything. It is just a hunk of extruded neo-suburban architecture, synthetic by every definition. It’s out of place anywhere that’s really a place.
It turns out that Milwaukee is different than Wauwatosa and many other American cities. How cities develop has a lot to do with politics. In the beginning, developers need help from a city before the market takes off. For example, TIF districts can stimulate development, as they can in suburbs. As in the Beerline project, when the city owns the land, it can sell it cheaper to the right developer, who will build something that will further the public interest in a way the market has not yet imagined. Rewriting building codes, as Milwaukee has, can also promote smart urban growth.
A project like The Reserve could not be built in Milwaukee today. City bureaucracy would immobilize it. New codes forbid parking lots surrounding a residential building and such a large fence.
Some time during his first term, Mayor John Norquist got religion – an unshakable belief in urbanism. It is a pretty simple set of convictions. The ways in which cities differ from suburbs is a virtue rather than a vice. Grids, buildings meeting the street, different ways of getting around (including walking), small shops, museums, public squares and a density of at least 12 units per acre are all good. Sprawl is bad.
Unlike his predecessor, Norquist wanted to make Milwaukee less like the suburbs. The mayor relentlessly preached his urbanist vision everywhere and to everyone. (I first saw his anti-sprawl slide show at a Passover dinner at a mutual friend’s house.) Pretty soon, the architects and developers took up Norquist’s language. Anyone interested in getting something built in Milwaukee picked up a few key urbanist phrases and started talking about how their project was “friendly to the street,” “more urban,” et cetera.
Whitney Gould, architecture reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, became an influential advocate. A new generation of architects took over from the cozy old-boy network. Rather than back-room machinations, new projects became design competitions. A culture developed around the mayor’s urban design ideas.
Meanwhile, Norquist’s stubbornness consistently upgraded the quality of public works projects. The city haggled with the state Department of Transportation for 13 years to get the remarkable bridge that replaced the Sixth Street viaduct instead of one that looks like a freeway ramp.
Whenever he could, Norquist used public lands and projects to lead the way toward more urban designs. The Beerline development was destined to become a succession of culs-de-sac until Norquist asked Daniel Solomon to do an urban plan based on a grid. The city then broke up the land into several parcels and set up a design competition, pitting as many as eight developers against each other.
In retrospect, it’s now easier to understand why Norquist often declines to provide additional subsidies for businesses to either remain or relocate Downtown. He wants nothing to do with public policy that would make cities seem pathetic to anyone, much less real estate developers and bankers. Properly conceived, cities are engines that create value. All you have to do is connect the dots and watch them grow.
Urbanity is organic. Context creates value. Norquist has shown that there is a market for an alternative to sprawl.
Suburban developers, who have never built anything in the city, are coming to Milwaukee’s city planner, Peter Park, to find ways to make their buildings more competitive. Norquist has created a market for new architects and ideas. When completed, the Beerline will be held up as an exemplar of urban development and studied by other cities. The new plan for the Park East corridor expands these ideas and will create even more value Downtown.
We have reached a tipping point. Milwaukee is alive again.
Tom Bamberger is a regular contributor to Milwaukee Magazine.
