Milwaukee lakefront: From railroads to bike trails
I went for a bike ride last month. This one covered 240 miles, from western Missouri all the way into suburban St. Louis, and it took nearly a week to complete. For most of the journey, my companions and I played tag with the wide, fast, roily Missouri River, sometimes riding in the shade of steep bluffs at the water’s edge, more often separated from the stream by sprawling fields of corn and soybeans in the fertile, flood-prone bottomlands. It was harvest season, and massive combines lumbered through the fields like mechanical dinosaurs, each trailing a thick cloud of dust.
The trail we followed was the original roadbed of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, or MKT— a name that was further abridged to KT, or simply Katy. For nearly a century, from the 1880s to the 1980s, the Katy was a lifeline for residents of the Missouri River Valley, and small towns are still strung along its route like beads on a rosary. Pushed into oblivion by semi-trailers and interstate highways, the line died in 1986 and was reborn in the following decade as the longest continuous rail-to-trail conversion in America.
The Katy Trail was a pleasure to ride, and I came home with a fresh appreciation for the rail trails in our own backyard. None can match the Katy for length, of course, but southeastern Wisconsin’s trails offer an unusually rich blend of history and scenery. My personal favorites include the Bug Line in Waukesha County, the Hank Aaron State Trail in Milwaukee, and the Interurban Trail in Ozaukee County.
The region’s most historic rail trail,
and perhaps its loveliest, is the section of Milwaukee County’s celebrated Oak Leaf system that begins at O’Donnell Park, climbs the lake bluff above Lincoln Memorial Drive, traverses the east side, and then follows the Milwaukee River to Estabrook Park. Slicing through one of Milwaukee’s most congested districts without a single stop sign or red light, the trail connects lake and river, high ground and low, but it also connects past and present.
The lakefront trail’s history begins as a tale of corporate intrigue. From the day it was organized in 1863, the dominant railroad in southern Wisconsin was the homegrown Milwaukee & St. Paul, more popularly known as the Milwaukee Road. Its chief rival in the region was the Chicago & North Western (C&NW), headquartered 90 miles south. The two lines were proxies in the larger rivalry between Milwaukee and Chicago. As both gobbled up territory, their trains sometimes ran practically parallel to each other.
The C&NW was handicapped by its lack of a direct connection with downtown Milwaukee, a link that became more and more difficult to forge as the city grew. The railroad was knocking on the door in 1872, when it completed an “air line” from Fond du Lac to the edge of Milwaukee, with plans to go even farther. Frederick von Cotzhausen, the company’s general counsel, tried to bargain with the Milwaukee Road for shared use of its right-ofway into the center of town. “However,” he recalled in 1919, “my negotiations signally failed.” The Milwaukee Road, von Cotzhausen wrote, was “the almighty ruler in State and local politics,” and Alexander Mitchell, the tycoon who ran the line, “did not feel that his company ought to grant us any facilities adverse to their interest.”
Rebuffed by its rival, the C&NW looked high and low for another point of entry. Its chief engineer suggested running a line across the east side and then coming down the bluff to the lakefront at North Point. From there, after extensive landfill operations, trains could follow the shoreline to the Third Ward, “where lands were then at a low price,” wrote von Cotzhausen. “At first I was shocked at the idea,” the lawyer recalled, “because the expense of grading and protecting the track against the encroachment of the waves seemed enormous. But as the proposition was revolved in our minds it gained strength. The right-of-way along the beach was certainly cheap.”
It’s hard to believe that what is now perhaps the most cherished public space in our region — the downtown lakefront — was once so little valued. In 1872, however, Lake Michigan’s waves lapped against the foot of steep bluffs that made the beach practically inaccessible; every square inch of today’s lakefront is landfill.
It took just over a year to finish the first installment of “made land” on the shoreline. Working from the north, C&NW crews laid tracks along the east bank of the Milwaukee River to Locust St. and then crossed the east side to Lafayette Place, where they cut a canyon down to the beach. All the dirt they excavated was tamped into place on top of the sand to form a stable roadbed, which the railroad protected from the waves with a highly engineered system of pilings and cribwork. The tracks led to a depot at the foot of Wisconsin Ave. and then continued through the Third Ward to a swing bridge at Jefferson St., where they crossed the Milwaukee River and joined the North Western’s existing right-ofway to Chicago.
The new lakefront line was dedicated on Sept. 6, 1873, when nearly 600 visitors chugged into town from Fond du Lac and other communities on the “air line” route. “Large numbers of our citizens had gathered at points along the bluff,” wrote the Milwaukee Sentinel, “and the welcoming hurrah soon resounded along the shore.” The out-of-towners were treated to band music, city tours, and dinner at several downtown hotels, where speaker after speaker extolled the virtues of the new competition that existed between the Chicago & North Western and the Milwaukee Road.
The region’s two major railroads were approaching a state of parity that took architectural form in 1889, when the C&NW completed a depot on the lakefront equal in splendor to the Milwaukee Road’s central station near Fourth and Clybourn streets. Both landmarks, lamentably, are long gone, but the North Western’s swing bridge, unused for years, still splits the river at Jefferson St.
The lakefront right-ofway remained a work in progress. The original tracks across the east side were laid at street level, creating a serious safety hazard as the district grew. According to James Yanke, a former C&NW conductor who authored a detailed history of the line, the east side grade was lowered nearly 20 feet in 1905, creating a continuous stone-walled canyon from the lakeshore to Riverside Park.
For nearly a century, the shriek of locomotive whistles and the smoke billowing from their stacks were fixtures of life along the line. The tracks, however, were farther and farther removed from the shore as the city filled land to the east for Lincoln Memorial Drive. By the time the drive opened in 1929, automobiles had begun to challenge trains as America’s dominant transportation mode.
The lakefront line was a casualty of the competition. After years of attrition, passenger service ended in 1964, and Milwaukee County promptly purchased the right-ofway closest to downtown. The corridor was paved and opened to bicycle and foot traffic in the 1980s, quickly becoming one of the most popular units of the Oak Leaf Trail.
The lakefront segment is still a crown jewel in the county trail system. Adjusted for scale, it’s as attractive as the Katy Trail — without a Missouri River, perhaps, but adjacent to something even greater — a Great Lake. Traces of its rich history abound: In the silent witness of the occasional telegraph pole, in the blast holes scoring the stone retaining walls, and in a length of wrought iron fence that once marked some wealthy family’s backyard.
The old right-of-way tells an even larger story, and its central theme is change. Like Missouri’s Katy Trail, Milwaukee’s lakefront trail represents a transformation. Steel wheels have given way to skinny rubber tires; a roadbed created as an artery of commerce has become a corridor of recreation.
Like a fickle lover, the world is always abandoning one technology and embracing another. Which fixtures of our own era will meet the same fate? Freeways? Smartphones? Facebook? The generations will tell.