Car Wins Battle With Commercial Garage

A one-story building on W. North Ave. near Interstate 43 already wasn’t long for this world. But then a reckless motorist sped things up.

On the evening of May 24, a driver crashed into the building at 628-630 W. North Ave., causing the brick building’s facade to crumble.

The driver fled the scene on foot according to the Milwaukee Police Department.

“Car vs commercial garage,” says the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS) inspection report summary. The car won and the 2,356-square-foot building will be razed.

The building, which has occupied the site since 1925, is now cordoned off with barricades.

It was slated to eventually be demolished as part of Michael Adetoro‘s plan to develop an entrepreneurial workspace for creatives and a mixed-income apartment building on the larger 1.1-acre site. That project would have taken at least a year to move to construction, with Adetoro’s FIT Investment Group and Cinnaire Solutions likely to bear the cost of demolishing the structure.

Now DNS will need to hire a contractor and pay for it out of the city’s demolition budget.

The city has owned the property since acquiring it in 2007 via property tax foreclosure. Images shared by the city as part of an earlier request-for-proposals process showed the interior of the building in disarray. The exterior of the building had a series of artistic pieces on it that collectively said “A place to BECOME Bronzeville.”

The building, according to a city land use report, previously was used by the steam fitters union, an ice cream store, Midwest Manufacturing Co., WI Sound Equipment, Flourescent Manufacturing Co. and a physician. It’s been used as a salon and a church.

The Bronzeville corridor is seeing a growing number of major development projects. The 50,000-square-foot Bronzeville Center for the Arts is proposed for a site three blocks to the east and a series of city-owned, foreclosed homes are being redeveloped into houses for artists in the blocks to the north. An office building and small gallery space for the Bronzeville Center for the Arts are also proposed for a site just southeast of the FIT-Cinnaire site.

Developer Melissa Allen is building new houses and renovating others on side streets in the area as part of her Bronzeville Estates project. She was also a partner on the 4th Street School redevelopment and the recently opened America’s Black Holocaust Museum development in The Griot.

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