» Safety Building fate:
Journal Sentinel columnist Jim Stingl ponders the fate of the Milwaukee County Safety Building, which might be demolished for a new $184 million criminal courts building.
From the outside, the Milwaukee County Safety Building is gray and foreboding. A fortress. Step inside — good luck finding an entrance that’s open to the public — and the place has a grungy charm that fits its purpose of criminal prosecution, and a whiff of danger that belies its name.
I practically lived there for three years in the 1990s, sharing a press room with the Sentinel and whatever rodents found their way to a bag of trail mix I made the mistake of leaving in the office one weekend. My job was to find the most shocking and awful crimes and share them with you in the Journal.
Outclassed by the grand Courthouse next door, the Safety Building at 821 W. State St. puts function over form, though I feel less that way after walking the hallways Wednesday with David Budde, chief investigator in the district attorney’s office.
“I just love the history,” he said, turning over a sturdy wooden chair in his office to reveal a born-on date of 1929, the same year the building was constructed. He encouraged me to look closer at the marble hallways, terrazzo floors, chandeliers and ornate touches throughout the edifice.
It would be sad to lose such a beautiful building, Budde said.
Not everyone would choose that adjective to describe the Safety Building and its leaky pipes, lack of central air conditioning, unreliable elevators and mystery odors. In fact, consultants hired by the county
are recommending demolition and a new criminal courts building. The price would be $184 million, if anywhere near that much money is left over after we rebuild the Mitchell Park Domes.
A defense lawyer I know, Craig Mastantuono, calls it the dive bar of court buildings, with metaphorical stale popcorn and an outdated jukebox. Some will tell you at least one courtroom is haunted, he said, though I think spirits are more likely to occupy the building’s northwest corner, which used to house the county morgue. In Mastantuono’s view, the place needs to go.
But I also put the question to two retired prosecutors, longtime elected district attorney E. Michael McCann and one of his deputies, Jon Reddin. Together they survived nearly 75 years of Safety Building occupancy, giving them plenty of stories and sentimentality about the old place.
Back when Milwaukee police headquarters occupied the eastern half of the building, doors would remain open all night, which led to homeless people living in the stairwells, McCann said. The whole place had, and still has, an unbreakable quality, right down to the steel desks and thick walls.
“Talk about a mix in the hallways. They’re still there, the prostitutes, the pimps, the thieves, the shoplifters, the child molesters, the muggers, the armed robbers. You just never knew. The place pulsated with raw humanity,” McCann said.
He remembers doing research in the fourth-floor library, which opened to the same center atrium and light well as the county jail, when that occupied much of the Safety Building. Two decades after the new jail was built next door, all those empty cells are still there, 10 levels of them, used now for storage.
“Late at night you’d hear these guys screaming. Sometimes they’d be yelling messages to each other. Sometimes they’d be utter cries of despair. Screaming like the souls of the damned,” said McCann, who could have moved his office to the new Criminal Justice Facility one block west in the 1990s, but decided to stay put in the luxury-free Safety Building.
Reddin recalls a contest waged by prosecutors to document the various vermin living in the building, with 2 points for a roach they found, 3 for a mouse, 5 for a bat, and so on. After it made the news, Reddin received a complaint from the Bat Preservation Society.
Despite his fond memories, McCann said he thinks the Safety Building has lived out its useful life. Reddin, who has seen similar consultant studies come and go, agrees.
“We used to joke,” Reddin said, “that we could easily pay for the demolition and for a new structure by selling $1,000 chances to all who once worked there. A drawing would be held, and the winner would get to push the plunger to destroy the place.”