Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Milwaukee River Greenway: Wilderness in our backyard

Natural treasure provides nearly 900 acres of public green space

- John Gurda Guest columnist

The wonder hasn’t worn off. Every time I visit the Milwaukee River Greenway – on foot, by bike or in a canoe – I’m amazed that this sprawling urban wilderness exists. Any community would be overjoyed to have nearly 900 acres of public green space and an eight-mile stretch of equally public river frontage within its corporate limits. The remarkable fact about this particular wilderness is that it begins just one-and-ahalf miles from Milwaukee’s City Hall. Accessible to all and protected in perpetuity, the Greenway is one of our community’s greatest natural treasures.

There are better-known expanses of urban green space in North America, places like Central Park in New York, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Stanley Park in Vancouver, but those civic jewels are largely tamed and heavily trafficked. Our Greenway is still so wild that in its center you can easily imagine that you’re nowhere near a major city, or even a small town.

The sheer novelty of the corridor raises a fundamenta­l question: How on earth did it happen? How was such a huge tract of prime real estate preserved for public use? The answers are multiple. Topography played an obvious role. The Milwaukee River cuts a modest gorge as it enters the city from the north, creating steep banks that were high enough to discourage convention­al urban developmen­t.

History played an even larger role. Bottomland­s that now support hiking trails and kayak launches were underwater for most of the city’s existence.

Beginning with the first earth-and-gravel barrier in 1843, a succession of dams just below North Avenue created an impoundmen­t that extended past Capitol Drive. That long, narrow lake became Wisconsin’s first waterpark, a recreation­al corridor lined with swimming schools, amusement parks, beer gardens, canoe clubs and summer homes. This “in-town up north” lasted from the 1870s into the 1930s, when deteriorat­ing water quality and competitio­n from other venues put the riverfront establishm­ents out of business. As human activity tapered off, the banks returned to a state of nature.

Milwaukee’s leaders urged preservati­on of river land

Public policy was another critical factor in the Greenway’s creation. Civic leaders of years past weren’t blind to the site’s permanent recreation­al potential. Luminaries from Gen. Arthur MacArthur to banker John Puelicher urged its preservati­on “for public park purposes” as early as 1908. In true Milwaukee fashion, it was the Socialists who gave the movement legs. When voters swept the party into office in 1910, one of the new administra­tion’s highest priorities was parks, and one of the highest park priorities was the upper Milwaukee River.

It was Victor Berger himself who led the charge. As the chief architect of Milwaukee Socialism, the Austrian immigrant had made the party’s agenda his own. In 1911, before he left for Washington as the first (and for many years the only) Socialist in Congress, Berger proposed that the city purchase all the river frontage from Locust Street to Hampton Avenue, a continuous corridor three miles long. He had more than a thin strip of green in mind; Berger envisioned a 500-acre preserve covering all the high ground between Oakland Avenue on the east bank and Humboldt Avenue on the west.

His plan quickly moved beyond the proposal stage. Working for eight months with trusted real estate agents, Berger secured options on practicall­y all of the land within the corridor, including the Blatz beer garden, the Ravenna Park amusement park and the sumptuous summer homes of the Uihlein, Frank and Orton families, who must have felt the city encroachin­g. The estimated price tag for the whole package was $1.05 million, to be paid on land contracts with 20-year terms.

The idea was breathtaki­ng in its scope. Five hundred acres was more than half the size of Milwaukee’s existing city park system, and $1 million was the equivalent of $30 million today. Victor Berger considered the expense necessary:

“The time is past when parks are to be considered a luxury. Parks are necessary for every city and especially for every large city, not only because they afford a place for recreation and amusement for young and old, but mainly because they improve the air and atmosphere of the entire town. Therefore, parks have been called the lungs of the city, and a well developed park system is as necessary for any large city as a well developed pair of lungs for a human being.”

Air quality was a pressing concern in a smokestack town like Milwaukee, but Berger was thinking more broadly of the future: “It would be a crime if we should permit this beautiful strip … to become a factory site. Our children and grandchild­ren by right would never forgive us. And they ought not to forgive us.”

The “Berger Park Plan” generated a great deal of initial support. In March 1911, the Common Council authorized the purchase by a vote of 23 to 12, and the plan’s success seemed assured. There was, however, a stiff countercur­rent of opposition. The critics, most of them non-Socialists, argued that the plan was too ambitious, the price too high, and the timeline too aggressive. They wanted both an appraisal and a referendum, and the Socialists reluctantl­y agreed. Imagine their dismay when the appraisal of the “million-dollar parkway” came back at $751,728. Victor Berger contended that spreading payments over 20 years would logically justify a higher end price, but no one listened. When the purchase options expired, so did one of the most grand, even grandiose, ideas in the history of Milwaukee’s park system.

A vision for the river’s future begins to emerge

The city and then the county bought river frontage in a piecemeal fashion in the years that followed, parcel by parcel, acre by acre. They were executing a 1923 plan developed by another Socialist, Charles Whitnall, who believed that waterways were the natural framework for any urban park system.

It was not until much later, however, that the corridor took on its present coherence. The seed planted by Victor Berger in 1911 finally began to sprout in the forbidding mudflats above the North Avenue dam when it was opened to facilitate public utility work in 1990. (The structure was permanentl­y breached six years later.) As the tires and shopping carts were hauled away and plants returned, the riverscape began to emerge in its current form, and so did a vision for its future.

Beginning in 1988, a succession of groups — formal and informal, public and nonprofit— met endlessly to develop a plan for the upper river. Their efforts bore fruit in 2006, when the Milwaukee River Workgroup published a “vision paper” that urged the creation of a “unified environmen­tal corridor” above the old North Avenue dam. Called “Milwaukee’s Central Park” at first, it evolved into the Greenway of today: 878 acres protected by a creative stitchwork of public ownership, easements and zoning regulation­s.

The project’s remarkable success is celebrated in a new book, “The Milwaukee River Greenway: A Wealth of Nature in the Heart of the City.” Published by the River Revitaliza­tion Foundation, it is largely the work of Eddee Daniel, a gifted photograph­er and tireless chronicler of wild Milwaukee. The book is both a compelling narrative and a visual poem to the unexpected beauty of our principal waterway.

The Greenway’s success has many sources, but the most critical is also the simplest: love. From the Socialists of the early 1900s to the public officials and nonprofit leaders of today, generation­s of local citizens have seen the upper Milwaukee River for what it is: a priceless legacy of our natural past. They have looked beyond the problems created by civilizati­on and envisioned the river as a resource that gives countless urbanites unimpeded access to a world beyond the human.

In 1911 Victor Berger led the effort to “make the city of Milwaukee a present of its river, or at least the most beautiful part of its river.” His dream became a reality under different leaders in a different era, but, more than a century later, the gift he envisioned keeps on giving. The Milwaukee River Greenway is a wonder that endures, and we are lucky, oh so lucky, to have it in our midst.

John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email: mail@johngurda.com

 ?? EDDEE DANIEL ?? A flock of geese swoops over a man fishing on the Milwaukee River. It took years of work to realize a vision for a river greenway in Milwaukee.
EDDEE DANIEL A flock of geese swoops over a man fishing on the Milwaukee River. It took years of work to realize a vision for a river greenway in Milwaukee.
 ??  ??
 ?? EDDEE DANIEL ?? Rafters are seen plunging over Estabrook Falls. A new book celebrates the success of Milwaukee’s urban park. “The Milwaukee River Greenway: A Wealth of Nature in the Heart of the City” is published by the River Revitaliza­tion Foundation.
EDDEE DANIEL Rafters are seen plunging over Estabrook Falls. A new book celebrates the success of Milwaukee’s urban park. “The Milwaukee River Greenway: A Wealth of Nature in the Heart of the City” is published by the River Revitaliza­tion Foundation.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States