Parks Replaces Tippecanoe Park Playground

New playground at Tippecanoe Park. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Milwaukee County Parks recently finished replacing the playground at Tippecanoe Park on the far south side of the city of Milwaukee.

The playground, which was built in 1997, was completely redone with new playground equipment and safer surfacing. It was funded with $297,000 from an unrelated land deal the county negotiated in 2021.

Neighbors of Tippecanoe Park, 1411 E. Warnimont Ave., will notice the park has new poured-in-place rubberized surfacing, which is much softer than concrete, and engineered fiber wood chips. It also has new ADA-accessible features, pathways, benches and bike racks. Parks has also had a panel maze installed for children two to five years old. There are new swings, a slide and climbing structures complete with platforms, bridges and ladders.

In 2021, the county sold approximately 200,000 square feet of land on the Milwaukee County grounds to Irgens, a real estate development firm. Irgens had plans to develop a new business park with land it bought from UW-Milwaukee and it needed the parcel from the county for the project.

Irgens paid $1 million for the parcel and the next year, three supervisors sponsored legislation to use the cash from the Irgens deal to repair and rebuild aging playgrounds in the parks system.

Around the time the deal was being negotiated, the Milwaukee County Board was in the middle of its annual budget deliberations. Sup. Ryan Clancy, who now represents the Tippecanoe area, had moved funding out of a parking lot project for the Milwaukee County Sheriff‘s Office training center project into a new playground project in South Shore Park.

But in doing so, he had pushed the project in his district ahead of other playground projects in the county. When the Irgens deal was closed, Clancy co-sponsored legislation with Sup. Shawn Rolland and the former representative of Tippecanoe Park, then-Sup. Jason Haas, to fund the Tippecanoe project, another playground replacement in Cooper Park and a handful of other playground resurfacing projects throughout the county.

In 2021, the board finished redistricting, and when Clancy ran for re-election in 2022, it was in a district that now includes Tippecanoe Park.

“I’m overjoyed that we can provide this community a new, more accessible playground. It’s investments in spaces like this that make our neighborhoods safer and more joyful places to live, work and play,” Clancy told Urban Milwaukee Thursday. “I hope that we can do a better job of budgeting to meet community needs like Tippecanoe instead of continuing to put so many resources into punitive approaches as we have done for too long.”

Before and After

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