UWM Students Design A Future Without I-794

Mastodon master plan for Interstate 794 replacement.

“If 794 comes down, what’s possible?”

That was the challenge posed to 14 UW-Milwaukee students in a UW-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning seminar by professors Carolyn Esswein and Larry Witzling.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) has been studying replacing the east-west, elevated portion of Interstate 794 between the Marquette Interchange and the Hoan Bridge for more than a year and is considering options that include a boulevard or a substantially slimmed-down elevated freeway.

Split into teams of seven, the students in the semester-long seminar created two master plan concepts for what a freeway-to-boulevard conversion could look like. They presented their work Thursday at The Avenue.

“With planners, we’re looking at street design, enhancing Clybourn to handle lots of cars, while St. Paul is a little bit more a walkable, commercial street, bike lanes, parks, plazas. And the architecture students focused more on the massing [of future developments]… envisioning the types of housing and the scale,” said Esswein, the department co-chair.

Students broke the master plans into districts, tackling ideas like expanding the Milwaukee Public Market into a larger area or redeveloping the U.S. Postal Service’s central post office. Other options considered included how to route bus routes through the area or how to preserve the identity of the Historic Third Ward when a freeway no longer divides it from Downtown.

“When the highway comes down, the adjacent parcels that are available have a different value,” said Esswein. One of the master plans envisioned $4 billion in new development within 30 years, which would generate $100 million in new annual property tax revenue. Esswein said the group was then tasked with thinking about how that would be spent throughout the city.

“What excites me a lot is the housing,” said graduate architecture student Gabe Zaun who worked on a high-density lakefront area and helped run mathematical models for the larger master plan. Zaun said he put substantial time into calculating what amount of parking would be required, especially to accommodate more than 7,000 new housing units and the existing festival traffic.

He saw his opinion of the project change as he worked on the project. “I didn’t know much about it,” said Zaun of his opinion before the project started. Now he’s in the “it should come down” camp.

Isabelle Jardas, a graduate architecture student, helped create a subdistrict called “Hoan Landing” where the Hoan Bridge comes down to ground at its northern end. “What we want to do is pull the energy from Summerfest out,” said Jardas of the mixed-use district with housing, restaurants, possible music venues and other entertainment options. “We kind of see this as a good opportunity for the Third Ward to have some of that.” It would also contain a street grid capable of distributing the traffic from festivals and the bridge.

Jardas said one of the challenges she encountered was balancing the large lots that would be created with the need to shape buildings in a way that would provide natural lighting and create public plazas that open up to the street.

“I’m more leaning towards taking it down. I’m glad we got to explore some of the impact to the city if we did take it down,” said Jardas.

The students did not formally interface with WisDOT on the project, but their designs were based on the freeway-to-boulevard street grid options previously released by the department.

The two plans are known as Mastodon, a nod to the sculpture installed in 2023 on a remnant freeway parcel along W. St. Paul Avenue, and The Stitch, for reconnecting the area.

While the UWM project is at its end, WisDOT continues to pursue the project. In early April, Urban Milwaukee reported on the remaining design alternatives that are being studied. Community meetings are expected to be held later this year to allow the public to weigh in on the proposed designs.

UW-Milwaukee has a lengthy history of exploring big picture design concepts with graduate and undergraduate students. Much of the conceptual vision for the Park East Freeway’s removal was advanced by a design studio at the university. Students have also looked at several other areas, including the Marcus Performing Arts Center parking structure site.

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2025 WisDOT Design Alternatives