For the first time in over a decade, Wisconsin Avenue’s holiday chandeliers have been transformed. This year, the festive lights gleam in silver and gold, a refresh designed to preserve the tradition while introducing a modern elegance to Milwaukee’s downtown holiday spirit.
“The feedback has been spectacular,” Beth Weirick of Milwaukee Downtown said. “People always speak to just how important holiday lighting is and how it brings community together downtown. The beauty, the sophistication and the elegance of this design have been so very well received by the community.”
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Weirick serves as the CEO of Milwaukee Downtown, the downtown business improvement district, and will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of her role in January. She spoke with Milwaukee Magazine about the evolution of Milwaukee’s Wisconsin Avenue. holiday lights display, and how the new chandeliers came into fruition.
In 2002, the organization put up new green garlands with red and green lights, wreaths and red bows. “Everybody was so excited to see the holiday decor come back over the Wisconsin Avenue intersection,” Weirick said. “People loved it, and it was very reminiscent and nostalgic to when we used to have the garland decorating downtown Milwaukee in the 1960s.”
About five years later, “we decided to do something a little bit more innovative and creative,” Weirick said. Five-point Moravian stars were installed with a halo hanging above them over each of the 17 intersections on Wisconsin Avenue.
In the early 2010s, the blue and white chandeliers were installed for the first time and have hung every year until 2024, when the new gold chandeliers arrived. The blue chandeliers were three-tiered chandeliers with simple strands of lights connecting to each of the poles at each intersection. Through the years the lights were updated to LEDs and had been refurbished when needed.
“For the last for years we have been looking at what we could do to give yet a new fresh face to the intersection treatments on Wisconsin Avenue,” Weirick said. “Because we know how near and dear the chandeliers have been to Milwaukeeans, we didn’t want to replace them, we only wanted to enhance and refresh them.”
So, Downtown Milwaukee worked with James Glancy Design out of London to give the annual holiday lights a new look. The company is known for its seasonal light displays of angels through Regent Street in London. “We shared with them our existing chandeliers and told them that we really loved the angels and wanted to do something that resembled those.”
Together they worked to come up with the current design concept that can be seen if you take a stroll or drive down Wisconsin Avenue. Then, local landscaping company KEI assisted in sourcing the necessary materials and fabricating the light displays by hand in Milwaukee.
Weirick said that each intersection had to be designed specifically given the complexities of each one. The spacing of the poles are all different, and Wisconsin Avenue, east and west of the river, do not align perfectly. So, when centering the pieces, each light structure had to be engineered specifically for that intersection.
“This was almost a five-year project to bring these to fruition,” Weirick said. “A lot of work and innovation and tenacity has gone into now what we were so excited to unveil this year. And we loved the silver and gold concept, just the brilliance of it all and just how elegant it looked in refreshing these intersections, but keeping the chandelier concept.”
Looking to the future, Downtown Milwaukee plans to continue with the gold and white light displays, at least for the next few years. “Our objective is that when we make this level of a capital investment, our goal is that we will get at least five years of life,” Weirick said.
