Milwaukee Public Museum, Betty Brinn join up
Milwaukee Public Museum and Betty Brinn Children’s Museum have tentatively agreed to eventually relocate together to a new downtown area building.
That Wednesday announcement is short on details, including a specific location for the new development, its design and cost estimate.
A downtown area site is under consideration, but more information won’t be provided until it’s under contract — possibly by year’s end.
“As the colocation process continues over the next several years, we will have more information about what this — and the building itself — may look like,” said Katie Sanders, Milwaukee Public Museum’s chief planning officer.
“We anticipate that we will be able to welcome visitors by the end of 2025 or the beginning of 2026,” Sanders said, in
a statement.
Still, the fact that the institutions are pursuing an alliance to enable them to share a new building is a major development in Milwaukee Public Museum’s long search for a splashy new home.
The museums would remain as two separate organizations, with the much smaller Betty Brinn Children’s Museum being a tenant in Milwaukee Public Museum’s new building.
The votes by both museum boards to pursue an alliance comes after months of discussion.
“While the details of the alliance between MPM and BBCM remain to be ironed out, this marks the first critical step in what will be a years-long process to create a space where our community can enjoy two world-class museums under one roof,” said Ellen Censky, Milwaukee Public Museum president and chief executive officer, in a statement.
Censky said potential funding sources support creating a more efficient project by combining the two museums at one site.
“We could not be more excited as we look to the future and see all the potential that this alliance with the Milwaukee Public Museum will mean,” said Brian King, executive director of the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum, in a statement.
Milwaukee Public Museum, Wisconsin’s largest museum, has been located at 800 W. Wells St. since 1963.
The natural history museum in 2017 announced plans to move to a new downtown area location within 10 years rather than renovate its current building, which is owned by Milwaukee County.
That decision followed a two-year study that said renovating the current building would cost more than $100 million — a similar rough cost estimate for building a new museum.
Also, renovating the 400,000square-foot museum would not resolve a separate problem: the need to move 4.5 million artifacts out of the leaky basement to better protect the collection.
In 2018, the museum released two design concepts for its new home.
One design, from the Rinka architectural firm, encompasses a generic downtown block and features a campus dominated by a four-story glass building.
The Rinka plan includes two public plazas, with the entire center of the building serving as an enclosed pedestrian connection.
The other design, by Zimmerman Architecture Studios, is located on Milwaukee’s lakefront. It would be on what is now mainly a parking lot just north of the Milwaukee Art Museum and War Memorial Center, while also crossing above Mason Street and Lincoln Memorial Drive to the hillside just to the east.
That concept features a series of buildings located at different levels with terraces along the hillside.
Betty Brinn Children’s Museum opened in 1995 at 929 E. Wisconsin Ave., in O’Donnell Park. The 24,000square-foot museum features handson exhibits designed for kids.
In 2013, museum officials said they were considering a move to the proposed Couture high-rise development, 909 E. Michigan St.
That would have nearly doubled the museum’s space
The children’s museum had been drawing around 200,000 visitors annually since 2008, well above the 150,000 average annual visitor count during its first several years.
Also, the museum wanted more space for its exhibit development operations. It earns money by designing and developing exhibits which are then leased to other children’s museums.