O’Donnell Park has been canceled.
The Milwaukee Art Museum has rebranded the Downtown lakefront space and the parking garage beneath it as Museum Center Park, so quietly that your GPS might not know for sure.
In fact, the move was so quiet that it’s not even clear when it happened. It could have been just about any time since the museum purchased the structure from the county in 2017, although some evidence indicates the place was still being called O’Donnell Park for a while thereafter.
Whenever it occurred, the change outrages former aides to the guy for whom the park was named, the late Milwaukee County Executive Bill O’Donnell.
“It’s really a slap in the face to a man who did so much for Milwaukee County in his 40 years of government service,” ex-staffer Luisa Ginnetti says.
“It makes me very sad to hear that (his) legacy could be erased,” adds Patti Gorsky, another former aide. “He served as a respected, hard-working public servant for 40 years.”
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O’Donnell was first elected to the County Board in 1948, rising to board chairman in 1975. He maintained a blunt-spoken, blue-collar image while becoming a major player on county policy. Those two sides of O’Donnell came together when he championed the county’s takeover of the same buses that he rode to board and committee meetings at the Courthouse.
After the first county executive, John Doyne, decided not to seek a fifth four-year term, O’Donnell defeated then-District Attorney E. Michael McCann for the top job in 1976. Under O’Donnell’s leadership, the county created the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center in Wauwatosa and acquired the Milwaukee Public Museum from the city.
At various points in his county career, Ginnetti notes, O’Donnell also played roles in the construction of the former County Stadium, the expansion of Mitchell International Airport and the growth of the Milwaukee County Zoo.
O’Donnell served in the county’s top job for 12 years before losing a hard-fought 1988 contest to Dave Schulz, whom he had fired as parks director.
Work on O’Donnell Park started during the O’Donnell administration and was completed during the Schulz administration. The parking garage is built into the lakefront bluff at the corner of North Lincoln Memorial Drive and East Michigan Street. It’s topped by a 9-acre plaza where East Wisconsin Avenue curves into North Prospect Avenue, overlooking the Art Museum’s Quadracci Pavilion. That plaza includes the park’s Miller Pavilion, which houses the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum and a private event venue.
The complex’s original name recognized O’Donnell’s commitment to preserving the county’s lakefront assets.
Both O’Donnell and Schulz were dead — O’Donnell in 2004, at the age of 82, and Schulz in 2007, at the age of 58 — when the park became the site of a tragedy. In June 2010, on the first day of Summerfest, a 13-ton slab of concrete fell off the parking garage’s facade, killing a 15-year-old boy and seriously injuring two other people. The county and the victims’ families later won a $39 million verdict against the garage’s builder.
Even with the county’s share of that payout, however, the costs of renovating and maintaining O’Donnell Park led another county executive, Chris Abele, to push for its sale. An emotional debate over selling parkland ended in the County Board’s narrow defeat of a deal with Northwestern Mutual.
After that, Abele’s Republican legislative allies tried to cut supervisors out of deciding the park’s future. In the Joint Finance Committee version of legislation that gave the county executive unprecedented power to sell and lease county property, the board would have retained authority over all parkland — except O’Donnell Park. However, the state Senate removed the O’Donnell Park exemption, maintaining the board’s power over the park.
Eventually, the garage and rooftop plaza were sold to the Art Museum — along with the museum’s portion of the War Memorial Center — although the county retained ownership of the underlying land.
Notably, the nonprofit entity that the Art Museum formed to take ownership of the property was itself called Museum Center Park Inc.
But that name was not immediately attached to the garage and plaza. The rebranding wasn’t mentioned in any of the official announcements or news stories about the 2017 deal. The museum never issued a news release or any other formal announcement of the name change, although at some point signage on the plaza was altered to refer to Museum Center Park.
However, as of late June, the rental policy on the museum’s own website still mentioned parking at O’Donnell Park, not Museum Center Park.
News stories in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Milwaukee Business Journal continued to refer to the complex as O’Donnell Park until this spring’s release of the city’s draft Downtown plan, which labeled it “Museum Center Park (formerly O’Donnell Park).”
As of late June, Mapquest and Apple Maps showed both Museum Center Park and O’Donnell Park at 910 E. Michigan St. Google Maps and Waze, meanwhile, showed Museum Center Park at that address and “O’Donnell Park Rental,” which Google Maps described as a “bus station,” at 931 E. Michigan St. — the address of the former Downtown Transit Center, which was razed in 2016 to clear space for The Couture, still under construction on that site.
None of that explains why the Art Museum changed the park’s name, or why it did so entirely under the radar. Were museum officials trying to distance the structure they purchased in 2017 from the fatal 2010 facade collapse?
They’re as silent as the park’s signature orange sculpture, Mark DiSuvero’s The Calling. A museum spokeswoman said she had referred a reporter’s questions to a colleague who never responded.
This isn’t the first time a former county executive’s name disappeared in the sale of a county facility. Doyne was still alive in 1995 when the county sold his namesake hospital to neighboring Froedtert Hospital, which later demolished the Doyne building.
However, Doyne’s name remains on a northwest side park. Schulz, who served a single term as county executive, is recognized in the name of one of the water parks he pioneered. But with the rebranding of the Park Formerly Known As O’Donnell, Milwaukee County has lost its only memorial to its second-longest-serving leader.
“O’Donnell Park was a small but significant tribute to Bill O’Donnell — not that he sought any special accolades for his service,” Ginnetti says. “How shameful to erase his legacy by taking away his name on a park.”
