Milwaukee County didn’t borrow a penny to build the Mitchell Park Domes, but it might max out on borrowed time to keep the iconic structures intact. 

County officials don’t believe the conservatory was designed to last even 50 years, let alone 60, past the first dome’s 1964 opening. A 2018 consultant report warned that postponing major repairs would lead to demolition within five years – and that was more than six years ago.

Yet short-term fixes have held the complex together through eight years of debate over its future. Now the county and a nonprofit support group are nearing agreement on a $133 million plan to renovate and upgrade the conservatory. However, that work wouldn’t be completed for at least another six years – if the Friends of the Domes can raise the money to make it happen.

Can the Domes wait that long? Officials at the county and the Friends believe they can, but they also admit that the complex doesn’t have much longer.

“We’re on a tightrope,” says Supervisor Sheldon Wasserman, chair of the County Board’s Parks and Culture Committee. “The building is decaying. It’s not going to be forever.”

THE DOMES ARE A PRIME example of the county’s deferred-maintenance dilemma, in which needed repairs have been delayed year after year for lack of funding. County officials estimate the cost of all backlogged work now exceeds $1 billion. The vast parks system represents about half those needs, with the Domes as the costliest parks facility.

Some maintenance was deferred so long that the county razed structures that could no longer be saved, from the original conservatory in 1955 to the historic Trimborn Farm’s silos in 2017. Last year, county officials consigned a dozen parks facilities to the same fate.

Deputy Parks Director Jim Tarantino says the Domes always have posed an extra maintenance challenge, because they were designed more for dazzle than for practicality.

“I honestly think it was more like a World’s Fair-type structure” – meant to demonstrate future possibilities, not to last, Tarantino says. “They demolished a historic conservatory to build it. Preservation was not in the mindset.”

In fact, inventor R. Buckminster Fuller displayed one of his geodesic domes – a somewhat different design – at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal. By then, the last of Milwaukee’s three domes was almost complete, after phased construction took eight years because the cost-conscious County Board refused to issue bonds for the project.

Architect Donald Grieb designed the conservatory as the world’s first conoidal glass domes, intended to maximize sunlight and recycle rainwater for the plants within.

But the stormwater-capture system “clogged almost immediately,” Tarantino says, and the collecting rainwater has eroded concrete and the seals between glass panes. The design also complicates inspections and repairs in the Domes’ upper reaches. “It certainly wasn’t built for maintenance,” Tarantino says. “The maintenance of it is somewhat ridiculous.”

Seed Money

While the Friends of the Domes see a rosy future for the glassy conservatory, other institutions face thorny obstacles in their path to greater independence from county government. The nonprofit Friends hope to renovate and operate the county-owned Domes under a long-term lease. Here’s how two similar arrangements are working out:

Milwaukee Public Museum: A nonprofit took over the museum in 1992. Now the museum is constructing a new building to replace its deteriorating county-owned home.

The $240 million plan has won commitments of $40 million from the state and $45 million from the county, to be supplemented by a $5 million federal grant and $180 million in private donations. However, since reporting they had raised $80 million by March 2024, museum officials have been silent on whether they’ve met either the $105 million benchmark to release county funds or their announced goal of $108 million by the May 2024 groundbreaking. Nor are they saying what they will do if they can’t raise all the money they need.

Marcus Performing Arts Center: The county-owned center has been run by a nonprofit since it opened in 1969. A 2016 agreement provided for the county to phase out its operating funding over 10 years. The center had hoped to replace taxpayer dollars with revenue generated by redeveloping its parking garage on city-owned land.

Now the center is asking the county to continue subsidies in 2026 and beyond as it ramps up fundraising, saying nobody foresaw the COVID shutdown, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s move to its own home or the city’s plan to raze the garage and sell the land to a developer.

By 2004, a county assessment rated the Domes in poor condition. Since then, the county has spent millions of dollars on short-term repairs while putting off big-ticket items like replacing the boilers, Tarantino says. The largest repair job cost $2.6 million, to replace 750 glass panels damaged by a 2006 explosion at the nearby Falk Corp. plant. But unrelated cracks started to appear a few years later.

The Domes’ maintenance woes became a crisis in early 2016, when a chunk of concrete fell from the Desert Dome’s ceiling. County officials closed all three domes, installed mesh netting to protect visitors, and began talking about the future of the conservatory.

A task force considered the issue, and a growing army of consultants was enlisted for multiple studies. In 2018, one study suggested such options as converting the Show Dome into an Eco Dome – with live animals, aquariums and butterflies – or an Adventure Dome, with zip lines and climbing structures, at a cost of up to $95 million. A separate 2019 study for the Milwaukee Public Museum, then seeking a new home, recommended replacing the Domes with a $300 million combined museum-conservatory complex on the South Side site.

After those ideas were shot down, the Domes task force endorsed a more modest $66 million renovation plan from a team led by ArtsMarket, a Montana-based consulting firm. But in 2022, yet another consultant team found the plan was based on unworkable financial assumptions. That enraged Wasserman, who says the county was “ripped off.”

Meanwhile, interim fixes continue. In a 2023 report, Tarantino told supervisors that parks staffers “spend more time performing repairs and routine maintenance at the Domes than at any other Milwaukee County Park facility.” Maintenance costs average $350,000 a year, he says.

As part of those repairs, workers have built temporary internal gutters, a move that Tarantino calls “kind of sad” but necessary to catch most – yet still not all – of the rainwater that leaks inside and drips onto visitors.

DESPITE SUCH FLAWS, engineering reviews in 2019 and 2022 found the steel frame of the Domes remains structurally sound and the wire mesh is still effective in protecting visitors from falling concrete.

Those findings caught the attention of the Friends, who previously advocated replacement with a new conservatory. Now the organization hopes to leverage historic preservation tax credits – combined with county, state and philanthropic contributions – to finance a visitor-friendly restoration, Executive Director Christa Beall Diefenbach says.

The plan would add food service, expand the gift shop, speed up admissions and make the lobby more welcoming. An adjacent domed greenhouse and staging area, now closed to the public, would become a children’s area called the Little Sprouts Dome – adding more fun to what Diefenbach describes as a “don’t touch, don’t run, don’t do anything space for children.” Some of the money raised would go to revitalizing the surrounding Mitchell Park. And the Friends would operate the Domes under a long-term lease.

Wasserman and Tarantino back the plan, as do Supervisors Juan Miguel Martinez, who represents the neighborhood, and Steve Taylor, the parks panel’s vice chair. The full board has voted to contribute $30 million on an unspecified timeline, with details to be worked out by May.

Tarantino calls this plan “the best proposal we’ve had,” both in its funding structure and its emphasis on preserving the Domes’ original purpose.

Wasserman agrees, but warns, “This is really the last chance to save the Domes. The board is exhausted with all the different proposals … We’re going to give [the Friends] a chance, but if they cannot” raise enough money, “it’s over.”