South Shore Park Has a New Beach

South Shore Park Beach. Photo taken by Graham Kilmer Sept. 25, 2025.

For many years, South Shore Park had the unfortunate designation of being home to one of the worst beaches in the country. Not anymore.

Construction recently wrapped on a new beach at South Shore. While it will be many months until summer arrives again, county officials wasted no time in celebrating.

During a ribbon-cutting, Thursday, elected officials gathered with Milwaukee County Parks Staff and state and federal officials to celebrate a new community amenity and an environmental milestone for Milwaukee.

“The story on South Shore Beach was that it was one of the 10 worst-water-quality beaches in the United States,” said Jim Tarantino, deputy director of Milwaukee County parks.

The beach was regularly closed to swimmers for E. Coli contamination. The former supervisor for the area, and current alderwoman, Marina Dimitrijevic, said she used to hear her constituents lament that they could look out at beautiful lake water at South Shore, but they couldn’t use it.

After many years of planning and analysis, the best option proved to be simply to move the beach. It has taken more than a decade, from the initial testing to planning, securing funding, and construction.

“It was a science-driven, multi-agency, community-led effort to solve a long-standing problem,” said Sarah Toomsen, parks director of planning.

The McLellan Lab at the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences has worked for years with Milwaukee County Parks, testing the water and studying the conditions. The lab data informed plans to move the 1.7-acre beach 500 yards south, further away from the South Shore Marina and nearer an opening in the breakwater, where there is more water movement. The stagnant water in the old location was a breeding ground for bacteria from bird droppings, sewer overflows and stormwater runoff.

More than 50 students from the McLellan Lab worked on the project over the years, said Toomsen, who shared remarks on behalf of Professor Sandra McLellan. Students collected more than 2,000 water samples, measured currents and conducted dye tests.

Plans for the new beach were drawn up by SmithGroup. Construction started this spring and wrapped up in September. Later this fall, fences around the project area will come down once the turf has had time to take root.

“We’re just happy to see it done,” Tarantino said. “And now we have a swimmable beach.”

The beach is part of the local Area of Concern (AOC), a designation made by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that means it is among the most environmentally degraded sites on the Great Lakes. The Milwaukee estuary is one of 24 AOCs that remain on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes.

AOCs have complex environmental challenges that require significant time and resources to address, said Karen Hyun, Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). The scope of the problem often leaves solutions out of reach for local or even state governments, Hyun said. In 2023, the DNR awarded the project an $8 million Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) grant to rebuild the beach.

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is the critical federal program being used to fund remediation at AOCs around the Great Lakes. To date, $65 million in GLRI funding has been allocated to projects in Milwaukee, said Todd Nettesheim, deputy director of the EPA Great Lakes National Program Office.

Nettesheim commended the Milwaukee community for its “innovation” on the South Shore Beach project: “pick up the beach and move it.”

“I find that remarkable,” he said.

The new beach is bookended by rip-rap jetties to protect the beach from erosion. The design will stand out to visitors for the red granite, mined from quarries in Wisconsin, used to build the jetties, as well as the armor walls and benches that line the new beach.

Sup. Jack Eckblad noted that the new beach is one of several significant changes — driven by community members, volunteers and government officials — all coming together at South Shore Park this year. “We are seeing an entire generation of effort revitalizing South Shore Park,” he said.

Other changes include the reconstruction of the northern breakwater protecting the beach and and the replacement of the park’s playground.  Altogether, the projects represent a $35 million investment.

“Stewardship can be a really abstract term,” Eckblad said. “It’s not often that we get a real-life example of what it means when a generation of stewardship comes to fruition.”

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