MCDOT Breaks Ground On New Highway Maintenance Facility

Groundbreaking for new MCDOT North Shop. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

The Milwaukee County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) broke ground Thursday on a new highway maintenance facility on the north side of the City of Milwaukee.

The new $13 million, 50,578-square-foot facility will be nearly double the size of the old North Shop and will be an improvement for the county’s road crews working there. It will allow for new maintenance equipment and more operational capacity; and it will also include women’s bathrooms, bizarrely a first for the decades-old facility.

But it will also serve a second purpose, bringing additional parking for visitors to the county’s Schoenecker Park or the nearby Havenwoods State Forest.

Construction of the new facility, 6270 N. Hopkins St., will begin this winter, with completion expected by 2025. The new North Shop will also save the county money and have a lower carbon footprint than the previous facility thanks to new HVAC and lighting systems. The project was designed by Barrientos Design and Consulting and will be built by VJS Construction Services and Oxeland Group.

The North Shop facility was built more than a century ago. It’s the headquarters for the county’s road maintenance and snow plow crews on the northwest side. The lack of women’s restrooms is just one obvious sign of the facility’s age, and county officials have been trying to replace the shop for at least two decades.

“I hope that staff, the team that works in the north shop, understand I wasn’t lying five years ago when I first stepped in there and told them we needed to make sure that this happened,” said Donna Brown-Martin, MCDOT director.

County Executive David Crowley said tearing down and rebuilding the North Shop building was “extremely important.”

The county executive noted that the North Shop services many of the highways and roads that were built on top of middle-class, predominantly Black neighborhoods, displacing many families in the process. The county executive brought that up to note that after these roads were built, they fell into disrepair for lack of funding and maintenance.

“Highway maintenance issues, and ongoing neglect, in these particular communities and neighborhoods became very common,” Crowley said.

The new facility is a big deal for the MCDOT staff that have worked out of North Shop. Former employees and retirees attended the groundbreaking.

“Thank you to everyone that was involved in making this development project a reality,” Crowley said, “because together we will foster safer, stronger and better transportation infrastructure.”

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