What Will Be Done With Existing Public Museum Building?

Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo taken March 8th, 2017 by Jeramey Jannene.

When you build a new museum, what do you do with the old one?

Milwaukee County will soon need to figure out the answer to that question.

The nonprofit Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) is in the process of developing a five-story, 200,000-square-foot museum at the corner of N. 6th Street and W. McKinley Avenue. Construction is scheduled to be completed in 2027.

The relocation will leave the county with a vacant, seven-story building at 800 W. Wells St.

Before it must turn off the lights, the county is looking for a consultant to figure out who might turn them back on or determine how much the underlying land is worth.

The plan is to dispose of the building one way or another, but officials wish to do so “with an understanding of the current state and with future value and community benefit in mind,” according a request for proposals document for potential consultants.

The seven-story building was completed in 1962, with additions in the 1990s for Discovery World, which later left, and the IMAX theatre. The complex is nearly half a million square feet (451,161) and it has four full floors of exhibit space.

According to a 2015 assessment, the structure also has an estimated $28.6 million worth of deferred maintenance and more than $11 million of needed infrastructure improvements. Keeping up with the building’s needs over the next 20 years would cost an estimated $87 million.

The county plans to reevaluate these numbers before selling the property.

Museum staff have been struggling to keep the building in shape, with frequent mechanical system breakdowns and a pervasive moisture problem that is endangering some of the four million items in the county’s collections stored there. At times they’ve had to put out buckets to catch water that leaks into the building when it rains.

The maintenance and infrastructure needs pose a challenge to any future reuse of the building, according to the county. What’s more, any adaptive reuse would have to account for the fact that the building was designed as a museum and has many sections that are completely windowless.

The City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee Downtown BID #21 certainly have some ideas about what should be done to the property once MPM is all packed up and moved into the new museum.

Last year, the city’s Department of City Development and the BID completed a 2040 Downtown Plan. It included high-density, mixed-use redevelopment of the museum site, with “mixed income housing and neighborhood supporting commercial uses on the ground floor.”

The redevelopment would also allow the city to extend N. 8th Street another block north of W. Wells Street. Currently, as the street runs north, it dead-ends into W. Wells Street and the public museum. It restarts at W. State Street, multiple blocks to the north.

“Extending the street grid north of Wells Street to connect to MacArthur Square will also help to support additional infill development on surface parking lots in the area, and the reuse or redevelopment of the State-owned office building at 6th and Wells Streets,” the plan states.

While the county decides what to do with the soon-to-be former museum, the State of Wisconsin is also preparing to move on from the Milwaukee State Office Building. The property, just east of the museum, would be sold after the agencies within relocate to a new building at N. 27th Street and W. Wisconsin Avenue.

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