Plenty of Horne
UWM to Raze Old Hospital Building
Handsome old neoclassical red brick building can't be converted for university purposes.
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Handsome old neoclassical red brick building can't be converted for university purposes. Back to the full article.
Photos - Page 4
And from the same institution:
https://www.wuwm.com/post/homeless-tent-encampments-rise-milwaukee#stream/0
My daughter was born in that building.
Also went to school kitty-corner at Hartford University School.
There goes the neighborhood.
Goodbye.
One of my sons was born in that building, a little after 8 a.m. on a sunny day in August. The room where he was born had an east facing window. Natural sunlight was pouring into that room. I have often thought of the magic of that room in the 30+ years that I have walked or driven past what was Columbia Hospital.. That son also attended Hartford Avenue School.
So goes the neighborhood.
It’ll be interesting to see how much of that building they’re going to take down. The building on the corner was the entire hospital for most of its history. It was expanded extensively beginning in the mid-sixties, IIRC, so many of the buildings behind it are newer but the interior layout is a maze. Lots of memories in that old building sure, but hard to look at it as architecturally significant. Seems sensible UWM will replace it and eventually rebuild new facilities there.
It is unclear from Horne’s account why UWM ever purchased this building, given that its initial idea of how to use it (student housing) was eliminated when UWM built two new dorms. How did it come about that UWM spent so much money to buy this building, apparently without investigating it sufficiently to determine that it had no real use the university required? And if they had made such a determination, why did they throw good money after bad by maintaining it for a decade rather than tearing it down and building a new facility on the site?
This strikes me as gross fiscal mismanagement. Urban Milwaukee should investigate what happened here and why UWM’s expenditures were not more prudent.