The project would utilize $420,000 from TID #34 and construct a new Riverwalk section and dockwall.  The 80-foot section is comprised of two properties, and both owners, General Capital and Hoffman, have provided the city with appropriate easements to allow for the new Milwaukee RiverWalk segment. Further, a draft agreement with the Historic Third Ward Association was drawn up to handle maintenance of this section.  If approved the construction would start in April to be finished in August.

The project prompted questions and concerns from committee regarding the apparent change in city policy for this project.  Normally, the local property owner would fund 30% of a riverwalk segment’s construction, whereas in this case the city was planning to 100% fund the construction of the riverwalk segment.   Alderman Murphy asked “Why are we changing our practice?”  Remington answered that “we [the city] don’t want to wait for that development to take place.”  She also explained that there will be no direct connection to the property from the riverwalk, indicating that the adjacent property will received no direct benefit.  Alderman Witkowiak wondered if the city could assess the property owners much like the city does with sidewalks, and stated that this action would be “kinda sorta precedent setting.”  Alderman Bauman, explained that “I support this project,” but pushed to hold the project to work out details regarding a possible assessment or the possibility of requiring the property owners to buy the section if they choose in the future to connect to the system.  The file was held, and will be taken up at the next Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee meeting.

Reed Street Yards Site Plan

At the November 22nd, 2011  meeting of the Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee funds for the construction of new infrastructure within the Reed Street Yards were approved.   The 17-acre property, known as the Reed Street Yards, is located between South 6th Street and South 3rd Street, and has been targeted by the City of Milwaukee and the Water Council as the future center of Milwaukee’s water industry.  The project will be broken into two phases and include the construction of public improvements such as the $3.6 million extension of Pittsburgh Ave., new water mains, new sewer connections, 2,700 feet of Riverwalk, an extension of the Hank Aaron State Trail, 300 feet of dock wall that is in need of being repaired, and site remediation.

The financing for this project comes from TID #75, which was created in 2009 for this very purpose.  The funds to payback the TIF, will be generated through the redevelopment of a 88,000 square foot warehouse at 3rd St. and Pittsburgh Ave.  This building will become the home of the Water Council, and will house research facilities for Badger Meter and A. O. Smith, a $500,000 lab paid for by Badger Meter that will be available for tenants use, space for startup water businesses, a Viola water, energy, and transportation accelerator, UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, and a multitude of other entities in the water field.  According to Dean Amhaus, Water Council Executive Director, this combination of public-private partnership, in combination with startup space and the lab will make the this a “one of a kind building, from a global standpoint”.

2. Bike racks on buses, they’re coming.

3. The Milwaukee RiverWalk, take a stroll along the RiverWalk where the built environment meets the natural environment.  It’s not just for walking though, eat to your hearts content at Rock Bottom Brewery, the Milwaukee Ale House, or the Water Buffalo (by no means a complete list of RiverWalk eateries).   Lakefront Brewery has a nice RiverWalk segment and they serve beer, check that out.

4. RiverSplash gets the festival season going early, starting on June 5th.  Hopefully there will be a few more street closings this year to calm the crowds.  Seriously, we close way too few streets downtown for events.  If pedestrian overcrowding was a concern, just make the area bigger.

5. The Bastille Days run.  An athletic urbanist’s dream, what other event lets you run through the streets of downtown Milwaukee with only the fear of getting hit by a stroller?  Milwaukee needs more runs in the city.  The lakefront is great, but nothing compares to running through the city streets with 10,000 other people.  North Avenue?  Brady Street?  Westown?  All would be fun.

What did I miss?

Of course that’s not always the case, with the Quadracci Pavilion being the best example.  You of course know that building better for the world renown architect that designed it, Santiago Calatrava.

There is something else in downtown Milwaukee that we beat Chicago to, the riverwalk.  Chicago has really only been building out a riverwalk system since just before the turn of the millenium, while Milwaukee has been working on such a system since the 1980s.

Chicago is working to expand their system this year, hoping to complete portions near Michigan Avenue by June.

Things aren’t finished in Milwaukee either, this year we should finally see the construction of the segment connecting the Brewer’s Point Apartments with Lakefront Brewery and Trostel Square and a segment with the new construction of The Edge.  The Aloft Hotel will include an accompanying RiverWalk segment as the building rises. With time, we’ll also see a large expansion of the RiverWalk as The North End “Neighborhood by Design” comes together.

Now let’s just get rid of this cold weather, so we can get back to using the RiverWalk.

We checked when someone forwarded your blog post. The U.S. Coast Guard says this was actually sediment from an aerator that keeps ice off the boats. No fuel spill, the Coast Guard says.

One of the Edelweiss boats docked along the Riverwalk adjacent to the Highland Avenue pedestrian bridge appears to have begun leaking fuel into the Milwaukee River.  The Milwaukee Fire Department is on the scene to assess the situation, and presumably will be acting shortly.

Urban Milwaukee has obtained exclusive photos of the incident from an anonymous source.

First let’s step back to the origination of the problem. What I witnessed on Friday night first hand (and what everything I read seems to agree happened Saturday) was that teenagers began to “cruise” (drive in loops, while hanging their heads out of the window, yelling, and all sorts of other stuff that the DMV would advise against) up and down Old World Third Street from Juneau Avenue to McKinley Avenue. They would frequently block these intersections and the whole area had a general sense of lawlessness to it (I biked through around midnight on Friday, I’ll vouch for the lawlessness).

The general lawlessness of cruising spilled over into the area near the intersection of Highland and Old World Third Street, where the person ended up getting shot in the foot. I witnessed this first hand Friday night, and all indications point to that same situation occurring Saturday night. The illegal activity (cruising is against the law in Milwaukee) outside of the festival, fueled insanity within the festival.

This behavior was further enabled by the vacant Park East land where the Sydney Hih building and Gipfel Brewery sit (and Ruvin is to develop upon). In fact on a night where parking is scarce, very few cars made use of the Park East land to park in, and the few that did were certainly illegal.

If Ruvin was able to start construction on that lot already, none of this probably would have happened. The north end of the festival would have been calmer because cruising wouldn’t have taken place near the festival because the lot would have been blocked off. Why wouldn’t cruising have taken place? The cruisers were using the largely empty lot to turn around.

Now don’t misinterpret my article as saying Ruvin was at fault for the fiasco, he is certainly not. But if Ruvin had fenced off the entire block (Milwaukee County may have to do this since he technically hasn’t executed his option to purchase), it would have made the corridor along Old World Third Street a little less friendly for cruising. It also might have encouraged law enforcement to stand at that end of the festival (even though it is technically outside the edge of the festival) and discourage and ticket cruisers.

It would be hard to convince Scott Walker and company to spend money when they’re not getting any in return though, so why not for the night turn it into a parking lot? Nearby parking garage owners wouldn’t be opposed to this, since they’re owned by the city. The city and county could earn some money to help pay for police officers for the event by charging for parking. Suburbanites in town for the festival would have paid for the convenience, they don’t seem to enjoy the concept of street parking.

RiverSplash will certainly continue next year. If I was in charge (paging Robert Bauman) I would do the following things.

1. Install lights above buildings to illuminate the streets (this is done in Madison during Halloween on State Street and makes it feel safer and more welcoming late at night). Cars usually provide this, but are clearly absent during RiverSplash.

2. Patrol the areas outside of RiverSplash, I felt that there were plenty of officers inside the festival, but not enough on the fringes.

3. Institute a bottle fee at bars so that drinkers pay a deposit and earn it back for their bottles. This should reduce garbage and eliminate the urge to turn bottles into frisbees and footballs. When I studied in Kassel, Germany they made good use of this policy during festivals and it seemed to keep garbage bins largely empty.

4. Look at traffic flows, especially around Highland Avenue Pedestrian Bridge. The area seems to clog up for fairly obvious reasons (it’s narrow and the street is vertically separated from the curb at one point ). See if any barriers can be put in place to encourage movement.

I look forward to attending RiverSplash next year and hopefully seeing the construction progress at Gatehouse Capitol and Ruvin Development’s Hotel Palomar.

This is a huge win-win for both areas. First, this should increase commerce surrounding the airport by adding a labor-intensive business near a large retail stretch. Second, it’s obviously going to be a boost for efficiency for moving mail in-and-out of Milwaukee. With a significant amount of mail moving through the air, this should get it sorted and on-and-off planes faster and reduce costs for USPS.

In regards to downtown Milwaukee, the Third Ward, and the Menomonee Valley, this is the start of a huge boost that has been a long time coming. The new Milwaukee Intermodal Station that is quickly becoming a well-known gateway to Milwaukee is in a terribly misused and underused area. Eliminating the Post Office and replacing it with nearly any mixed-use building would be a huge boost for the area and trigger development in underused buildings and surface parking lots across the street.

The land that Milwaukee’s Central Processing Facility for USPS currently occupies is not only in a great location because of the proximity to the train station, but it sits on the Menomonee River immediately adjacent to where it merges with the Milwaukee River. Any development on the site will certainly seek to reconnect the neighborhood with the river and further foster urban Milwaukee’s image as an area that is increasingly connected with its natural capital.

If you want to consider the kind of visual impact replacing the Post Office will have, consider the Harley Museum set to open soon just across the river. Not only has that development triggered another development in the Iron Horse Hotel, but it’s taken a long underused property and made it a legitimate piece of the city again. Replacing the Post Office will not only trigger development north across St. Paul Ave, but will increase the value of the Harley Museum and all of the land along that stretch of the rivers.

Previously I had mentioned that a Kinnickinnic River Trail is in the works that would link up areas south and west of the Port of Milwaukee that don’t have good non-car access to downtown and the rest of urban Milwaukee. A key part of making that trail more attractive is the dredging of the Kinnickinnic River which would make it cleaner and more appealing for fish and trail-users alike.

The dredging will ultimately help encourage development along the river corridor and hopefully a Riverwalk extension to the area.

The deal currently is contingent on the EPA chipping in roughly $2 million from its Great Lakes Legacy Act program to cover the costs of expanding the Army Corps of Engineers’ disposal facility next to the ferry terminal . The Port of Milwaukee is set to pick up the remaining 35 percent of the costs to expand the facility. If the EPA doesn’t pick up the expansion costs, the deal is supposedly dead in the water.

My bets are on it happening, one way or another. I’m looking forward to a cleaner Kinnickinnic already.

This summer water taxi service provided by Milwaukee Water Taxi will begin operation along the RiverWalk fulfilling a long planned need. Business partners Aaron Kelly and Aaron Brock see the service as a amenity that will add new life and vibrancy to downtown. Kelly said that “we are trying to change Milwaukee” expressing his belief that this service will be beneficial to continued development efforts and raise the image of the city. The service plans to have eight stop and will run from Memorial Day to Labor Day. One way fares will be $5 and an all day pass will be available for $10 allowing customers to explore downtown extensively. This new service builds on the success of the initial planning and continues the momentum of re-development in downtown Milwaukee.

Continuing on these efforts the City is beginning work on the 2008 Downtown Plan. As part of this planning process the city is conducting an online survey asking residents for their input into the process. If you have thoughts on what will help Downtown Milwaukee’s continued growth you can participate in the survey by completing the Downtown Plan Community Survey.

Julie Lawrence at OnMilwaukee.com drew my attention to this excellent community development taking place along the Kinnickinnic River on the south side of urban Milwaukee, the Kinnickinnic River Trail. The trail is in the early stages of development and will have a southern terminus at the river and 6th Street (near its intersection with Cleveland St) and at Water St and 1st Street on the northern end.

The trail, while still in its infancy, will hopefully include a restoration of the river to a more natural state with the removal of the concrete channeling.

Like many other developments occurring in Milwaukee (the Riverwalk, Menomonee Valley restoration, and the Beerline neighborhood come to mind), the KK River Trail is just one of many ways in which Milwaukee is learning to embrace its natural assets. The developments are all the more special because they’re actual functional ways to move around the city without a car, which is due in large part to the dense development surrounding the rivers.

Groundwork Milwaukee has provided a PDF with all you could ever want to know about what was discussed in planning for the trail.

I’ll try to learn more over the next few days as to what the actual status of the trail is (it’s a little bit hard to figure out with the information online).

I took the map out of the PDF and put it online as a JPG image in case you wanted to see the proposed route.

The Brookings Institution recently ranked America’s most walkable big cities. Milwaukee didn’t crack the top 25 unfortunately, but consider this…

However, the Brookings report itself has some major flaws. I know I’m going to sound like a major hater here, but somehow out of 30 metropolitan regions nationwide, the Miami-Ft Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro ranked 8th place – above metros like New York and Philadelphia! For anyone who knows anything about cities and metropolitan regions, this should immediately raise a red flag.

So how is such a ranking possible, you ask? It comes down to Brookings’ flawed methodology for calculating walkable areas in each metro. Instead of calculating the percentage of area that is walkable in each metropolitan region, the Institution instead chose to go by arbitrary districts or neighborhoods, which vary considerably in size and functionality. For example, both Center City, Philadelphia and Coconut Grove, Miami were chosen as walkable locales within their respective metros. However, despite Center City being much, much larger than Coconut Grove, the two areas count the same…. Read more from Transit Miami

Milwaukee, while far from the ranks of Chicago and New York in terms of walkability, has made significant strides in the past few year. Things like the Marsupial Bridge, Oak Leaf Trail, and Riverwalk are significant and growing assets that signal the emergence of a pedestrian culture in urban Milwaukee.

It’s hard to find developments today in Milwaukee that aren’t pedestrian friendly. Developments like The Residences on Water, The Catalyst, and Edison Green all replace parking lots or underused gravel lots with intelligently-designed, sustainable towers that only will increase the pedestrian-centric transformation underway in Milwaukee.

Plus, it’s hard to ignore a city that has willingly removed an urban freeway to replace it with pedestrian-minded buildings.

So yeah, Milwaukee isn’t on a flawed list today, but the community at-large is working to set the standard for tomorrow.