Public Museum Experiencing Frequent Maintenance Issues

The Exploring Life on Earth area of the Milwaukee Public Museum. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

As Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) officials scramble to develop a new public museum, maintenance issues continue to plague the existing building on W. Wells Street.

The museum at 800 W. Wells St. was built in the 1960s. It has been in desperate need of significant maintenance and remodeling for years. The facility’s deteriorating condition was a major driver for the development of a new $240 million museum. Lately, the museum has suffered frequent breakdowns of some major mechanical systems that move people around the building.

“So we have been experiencing a noticeable increase in elevator and escalator failures, despite a robust maintenance program,” said Ellen Censky, MPM president and CEO, on Tuesday. “This is really due to the age of the systems.”

During the past six months, on approximately 50 separate occasions, there has been an elevator or escalator that is out of service, and sometimes both, Censky told the Milwaukee County Board’s Committee on Parks and Culture.

In July, a cooling tower installed in the 1990s failed. This tower was responsible for providing water to the chiller that cools most of the building including the collection areas. There are approximately four million items in the museum’s collections. It took a month for the museum to source a new part for the old tower.

“So during that time, we did have trouble keeping the humidity and temperature that our collections prefer,” Censky said. “And we do continue to deal with the humidity issues in the basement.”

The building struggles with moisture infiltration, which threatens the collections in particular. The museum has, at times, been forced to put out buckets to collect water that leaks into the building during storms.

When the museum was up for re-accreditation from The American Alliance of Museums, the precarious storage of the museum’s priceless collections was at issue. The accrediting agency tabled the museum’s application until it had a plan in place to secure the long-term safety of the collections. That plan ultimately became the plan for a new museum.

Collections Being Moved

Moving the collections from the current museum will prove to be a Herculean task for MPM, as Urban Milwaukee previously reported.

Museum officials expect it will take eight years to inventory, pack, move, and unpack all of the items in the collections. The process began in 2021 with an inventory of everything in the collections. Soon, some of the most stable items will be packed, Censky said; things like glass and ceramic artifacts that can stay packed away in crates for a while.

The items don’t have to go far. The $240 million new museum will be built on a 2.4-acre parcel at the corner of N. 6th Street and W. McKinley Avenue. Construction is planned to begin in spring 2024 on the new 200,000-square-foot museum.