Former Bus-Streetcar Facility To House Custom Shipping Container Company

County Executive David Crowley, center, with Lyle Stofflet and Tom Daugherty (left to right). Photo by Graham Kilmer.

A growing manufacturer will soon take over the former Fiebrantz bus station at 1900 W. Fiebrantz Ave.

Entrepreneurs Tom Daugherty and Lyle Stoflet are purchasing and repurposing the former Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) facility to expand Containers Up, a custom fabricator of repurposed shipping containers for use as outdoor bars and other uses.

Together, Stoflet and Daugherty currently operate several businesses in the same building as Containers Up at 4997 N. 33rd St., including Stratus Industries, a metal and wood contract manufacturer and Green Frog, a portable toilet rental company. Containers Up occupies a small bay of the building.

Urban Milwaukee, in August, broke the news that the partners had won a request for proposals to purchase the property.

County Executive David Crowley toured the current Containers Up facility Wednesday, in advance of the business moving into the former county-owned building. Crowley talked up the company’s potential to bring stable jobs to the area, and to give high school students hands-on work experience through an internship program the business plans to run with Rufus King High School.

“This is a great opportunity to bring economic stability to our neighborhoods,” Crowley said. “So I’m really excited that we found some partners to move into a county-owned building to actually revitalize a county asset and bring it to a place where the community will actually love what’s actually going on there.”

Stoflet and Daugherty are purchasing The 90,000-square-foot bus facility from the county for approximately $500,000. It will allow the business to expand. “We’ve been really hamstrung for the last couple of years,” Daugherty said, “wedging containers into a tiny space and limiting what we could do for production.”

Daugherty estimated that the business will be able to triple its production capacity, and potentially more than triple its workforce. Their portable toilet rental company, Green Frog, will also be moving to the new facility. The Containers Up jobs will be skilled positions like welding and fabricating, according to the report, paying $17.50 to $45 an hour. The Green Frog jobs will involve cleaning and maintenance and will pay $15.50 to $25 an hour.

“We’ve been fortunate and able to grow Containers Up over the years,” Stofflet said. “And now with the new space and working with the county that we thank for putting this deal together, we’re able to bring these different jobs between welding, fabrication, woodworking, all into that area.”

The Fiebrantz property is composed of two parcels. One is a 3.8-acre parcel with a three-story, 90,482-square-foot building containing the service garage, bus terminal and dispatch office. There is also a 0.25-acre parking lot located across W. Fiebrantz Avenue.

The Fiebrantz station was closed in 2018 as part of a long-running effort to save the county money by reducing its real estate footprint. It had long been the oldest and smallest station in the transit system.

The bus station was built in 1929. The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company (TMER&L) owned the building and used it as a hub for the city’s streetcars. The county acquired the station in 1975 alongside the floundering private transit company.

August Photos