Potential Developers Tour Milwaukee Public Museum
County seeks developers, perhaps high-density housing to replace downtown museum that's closing.
Milwaukee Public Museum, 800 W. Wells St. Photo by Graham Kilmer.
Real estate and construction professionals took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) on Tuesday.
MPM is building a new five-story, 200,000-square-foot museum, which will be called the Nature and Culture Museum of Wisconsin, at 1310 N. 6th St. When it opens in 2027, MPM will vacate the county-owned building at 800 W. Wells St. In the meantime, the county is seeking a developer to acquire and redevelop the property.
The seven-story museum was completed in 1962. It sits on a 3.7-acre parcel south of MacArthur Square. Additions were built in the 1990s for the Daniel M. Soref Dome Theater & Planetarium and Discovery World, which later moved to 500 N. Harbor Dr. on Milwaukee’s lakefront. The complex is about 451,000 square feet and has four full floors of exhibit space.
The potential bidders were given a sense of the structure: where the original meets the 1990s addition, originally built for Discovery World, and how the museum’s “Wizard Wing” and the city parking lot under MacArthur Square sit above a Wisconsin Department of Transportation tunnel providing an off-ramp for I-43. They were led into the basement of the building, and then the sub-basement, where some of the museum’s 4 million collection items have been stored for the past six decades. In one section of the basement, nearly every shelf, every table, every remaining item — in this case, old murals — was covered in plastic tarps.
At least once a year, the museum experiences some type of water event that threatens collection items, said Steven Raynier, MPM director of facility operations. In 2021, MPM struggled with reaccreditation because of the threat the leaky building posed to the collections. The poor condition of the museum building was a driving concern behind the push for a new facility.
The county is open to any proposed options for acquisition and development of the Wells Street museum, including complete demolition, partial demolition or adaptive reuse of some or all of the interconnected buildings, but it is encouraging high-density downtown housing, including units affordable to area residents. The City of Milwaukee’s 2040 Downtown Plan envisions splitting the museum into two parcels and extending N. 8th St. to MacArthur Square Park.
Demolition is estimated to cost between $12.6 million and $13.6 million. The difference depends on whether the underground “Wizard Wing” connection to the MacArthur Square parking garage is retained. The city plan envisions high-density, mixed-use development with mixed-income housing and ground-floor commercial space.
A consultant report by GRAEF, Bear Real Estate Group and CG Schmidt recommended the county demolish the buildings and market the site for mixed-use redevelopment. The buildings would prove difficult to adapt and are in poor condition. The consultants considered the property more valuable without the museum buildings and estimated the site could bear up to 555 housing units if redeveloped.
Potential developers have until Sept. 7 to submit a proposal for the buildings.
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