The Fund for Lake Michigan: supporting environmental restoration and innovation

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It didn’t take much persuasion. When Vicki Elkin suggested that we go to Three Bridges Park for our photo session I jumped at it eagerly. The park is one of several projects in the Menomonee Valley that have been made possible in part by grants from the Fund for Lake Michigan, which Elkin administers. As regular followers of this blog know, it is also one my favorite places in the Valley.

We stroll between the contoured slopes of park hills that rise from a formerly flat rail yard. Fresh green grasses and newly planted seedlings emerge from burlap staked down to prevent erosion during this fragile stage in the process of vegetating the park. A row of boxcars sits idle on one of the remaining tracks adjacent to the park. The human hand in creating what eventually will become natural-seeming habitat is everywhere apparent. It’s an example of what I like to think of as “intelligent design” and an appropriate setting to talk about Elkin’s role as Executive Director of the Fund for Lake Michigan as well as the variety of environmental, scientific and technological projects it has enabled. (A photo essay of 3 Bridges Park development follows.)

The Fund’s mission is to provide financial support for efforts to improve the health of our Great Lake, which includes both the shoreline and tributary watersheds. The Fund focuses primarily on projects in Southeastern Wisconsin and the Menomonee Valley has particular appeal. “So much is happening in the Valley that generates interest in projects here,” Elkin tells me. “There’s a lot of buzz and we have great partners like the Urban Ecology Center, the Water Council, MMSD and the Menomonee Valley Partners.”

Moreover, she says, “the Valley projects are a microcosm of the types of projects we like to fund where you’re making improvements to water quality and supporting demonstration projects, but also having an economic impact. The fact that we’ve been able to support both habitat restoration and innovative stormwater projects is perfect for us.”

In addition to Three Bridges Park the Fund has contributed to several other Valley projects and plans for more in the future. Elkin describes some of them for me.

The green roof at the Global Water Center “isn’t just any ordinary green roof,” she assures me, “it’s a research lab monitored by the UWM School of Freshwater Sciences to test what works best under what conditions.”

Two industrial-sized rain barrels have been installed under the 35^th Street viaduct that will capture and filter 68,000 gallons of rainwater a year, reducing the amount of polluted runoff flowing into the Menomonee River.

At the Reed Street Yards a number of innovative stormwater initiatives are “pushing the envelope of systems for capturing rain and filtering stormwater.” One of the goals of the Reed Street Yards development, as in other parts of the Valley, is to capture all stormwater on site. (A photo essay of the Reed Street Yards development follows.)

Upstream on the Menomonee River Milwaukee Riverkeeper and MMSD are working to remove impediments to fish, such as concrete weirs and low dams. This will not only improve the river for fish habitat but also for the human visitors that already have made the Valley a popular destination for fishing.

Finally, the project that has me as excited as it does Elkin is the proposed Burnham Canal restoration. This disused canal is one of few remaining that once provided barges and other watercraft access to businesses throughout the Valley. Currently “it’s an eyesore and a liability,” as Elkin puts it. The project is intended to restore the concrete-lined, polluted canal to sustainable wetland wildlife habitat. “I think it has the potential to be transformative,” says Elkin, “and could be an example for other parts of the Great Lakes of how to do restoration in a highly urbanized, industrial area.”

The Burnham Canal project also exemplifies visionary leadership as well as the momentum of revitalization in the Menomonee Valley. “It’s a Superfund site now,” Elkin tells me. “The canal could just be capped and otherwise left as is, but there’s so much happening throughout the Valley that it seems right for this to be the next area for revitalization.  I really commend MMSD for putting forward a bold vision for restoration of the site.” Building upon the success of Three Bridges Park, “we can bring nature to the east end of the Valley, turn liability into an asset.”

I ask about the Global Water Center, which is where the Fund’s office is located at the downtown edge of the Menomonee Valley. “I love it!” is her enthusiastic reply. “Watching the Water Council and water cluster develop first hand is inspiring. There’s a lot of interaction and positive energy, creativity and people excited to work together. It’s refreshing for me to work in such a strong community.” She finds it exciting to work with the people who “are at the cutting edge of the types of projects and innovative water quality technologies we’re funding.”

As we wrap up our session at Three Bridges Park Elkin points across the Menomonee River. There, in contrast with the newly refurbished riverfront of the park, the north bank stands in wild abandon. Thickets of buckthorn and other invasive species create a dense snarl. Clearing the bank of invasives and extending the park trail along the north bank is a planned future project, she says, and the Fund for Lake Michigan is ready to make a contribution.

Elkin grew up in Chicago and identifies with Milwaukee and particularly the Menomonee Valley. Her father, an urban planner, worked on redevelopment of Chicago’s inner city neighborhoods. “I like Milwaukee’s mix of cultures, having industrial and residential neighborhoods near each other and seeing that what’s happening here really makes a difference in people’s lives. We’ve got it all here in the Valley.”

Two short photo essays of Fund for Lake Michigan projects:

Three Bridges Park

2008

2009

2012

2014

Reed Street Yards

View from Sixth Street 2006

March 2014

March

May

May

June

June

July

August

For more information go to the Fund for Lake Michigan website.

This post is one in a series that relates to my Menomonee Valley Artist in Residency. For more information about the residency and links to previous posts and photographs, go to MV AiR.

Why I am here: On beauty in the Menomonee Valley

A constant, rhythmic thunder reverberates from the steel underside of the wide freeway overhead. Below, the Menomonee River slides silently between tilted flanks of concrete. Colorful graffiti decorates floodwalls on both sides of the channel; a skull motif interspersed with a surprisingly aesthetic tagging style.

Two young women walk slowing along the canted concrete. They stop now and then to photograph, one with a digital SLR, the other with a cell phone. They seem like students. When I reach them I ask. One says yes, they have come all the way into Milwaukee from UW-Waukesha.

When I explain my own presence as artist in residence their expressions brighten with curiosity. One of them asks if there are any other places they can go to get good pictures. I hesitate, not knowing where to begin. Before I can formulate an answer, misinterpreting my gesture, she responds: “I guess not, huh?”

“On the contrary,” I reply quickly. “There are too many choices to describe them all. That’s why I’m here.”

To allay her sudden bewilderment I mention a couple of locations nearby that I revisit regularly. Then we part, setting off in opposite directions along the railroad tracks, seeking—each in our own fashion—to capture a fragment of this remarkable and complex place in the warmth of an Indian summer afternoon.

Myriad questions follow me down the tracks: I wonder what drew them to the Menomonee Valley, these two students from suburban Waukesha County? What will it mean to them? What essence of this place will they express in their photographs? Does it speak to them, as it does to me, in a cacophony of overlapping voices?

The Menomonee Valley is a model for economic redevelopment that integrates business and industry with restoration of natural processes. The post-industrial landscape still bears scars from decades of neglect and abuse and yet the new industrial landscape rising among them includes attractive parks and recreational venues. Here is a symbol of new urbanism, a contrary voice of hope in a world we are constantly told is facing imminent environmental collapse. Its story is one of transformation, not merely or even primarily the transformation of the land itself, as significant as that has been. There is a deeper narrative, one rooted in how we as humans relate to the land, how we have changed.

Rebecca Solnit says, “If environmental problems are really cultural problems—about the nature of our desires and perceptions—then a crucial territory to explore or transform is the territory of the mind.”¹

What we have learned, here in the Menomonee Valley as elsewhere, is that our actions have consequences that often we cannot foresee. The destruction of a wild rice marsh once seemed so insignificant a price to pay for the growth of an industrial economy that no portion of it was spared. But, slowly, like an alcoholic trying with erratic success to stay on the wagon, we are learning how to live on the earth without destroying it. We are reintroducing natural features into a landscape thoroughly altered by human activity. In the process we are reintroducing ourselves to nature and learning to value its many manifestations, even and perhaps especially in the heart of the city.

As a counterpoint to common scenarios of environmental disaster, the transformation of the Menomonee Valley can resound as one of the success stories that symbolize the more important changes in the territory of the mind.

“Many…artists have been driven by a moral imperative” to play a role in this transformation, says Solnit. Like many rust-belt regions, the Menomonee Valley has been a magnet for artists. The two student photographers from Waukesha are just the latest to come here for inspiration. Are they here to mine the decaying past or celebrate the possibility of a brighter future?

I concur with Robert Adams who said, “The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope.”² Photography has a long tradition of aligning itself with concerns for nature and conservation of wilderness, as exemplified by an earlier Adams named Ansel. But in the late 20^th Century Robert Adams and other photographers of the “New Topographics” school began to question the popular wilderness aesthetic. Pointing their cameras at human-altered landscapes, they rejected “longstanding landscape paradigms of the picturesque, pastoral, and sublime.”³ Instead they championed a clear-eyed examination of the land and our often troubling relationships with it.

Their efforts, arguably, have contributed a great deal to the still nascent transformation of the mind that is necessary to creating new, healthier and more sustainable relationships with the land. Today, of course, many things have changed, including photography, which is more democratic than ever. New technologies enable more people to photograph anything and everything, everywhere. Like the cacophony of voices that must be deciphered to hear the story of the Menomonee Valley, a multiplicity of overlapping paradigms now prevails in how we perceive our place on the land and in the world.

The romantic view is alive and well, sitting, somewhat uncomfortably perhaps, alongside dispassionate critique. New paradigms have joined the mix. Some of the voices are passionate advocates for change. Some speak of the need for community; others for a resurgence of spiritual perspectives.

Many of these paradigms are playing out in the Menomonee Valley. Part of my role as artist in residence, I believe, is to try to untangle the various threads of the story and “to be coherent about intuition and hope.” Post-industrial decay is so Twentieth Century. The challenge today is to discover and to reveal the surprising beauty of nature married with progress toward a sustainable future in unexpected places like this.

Forty years ago Robert Adams wrote, “Scenic grandeur is today sometimes painful. The beautiful places to which we journey for inspiration surprise us by the melancholy they produce.” He attributed that sense of melancholy to “the way we have damaged the country.”² Although by many measures things have worsened since then, I believe there is reason for hope. That hope will be manifested most clearly when young people from the suburbs journey to places like the Menomonee Valley to be inspired, not by graffiti and residual blight but by the burgeoning beauty in the formerly damaged country of the inner city.

That may or may not have happened today but it is why I am here.

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Notes:

1. Solnit, Rebecca. As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art. The University of Georgia Press. Athens. 2003.

2. Adams, Robert. Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. Aperture. Millerton, N.Y. 1981.

3. Foster-Rice, Greg and Rohrbach, John. Reframing the New Topographics. Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago. 2010.

This post is one in a series that relates to my Menomonee Valley Artist in Residency. For more information about the residency and links to previous posts and photographs, go to MV AiR.

Canal Street and placemaking in the Menomonee Valley

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Canal St. overpass connects east end of valley with west

(A photo essay follows.)

Sometime around the turn of the millennium I stood on the stub end of Canal Street and looked across the west end of the Menomonee Valley at a scene of devastation. Near at hand stood Falk Corporation, one of the few old heavy manufacturing industries left in the Valley, which once had been full of such factories. Off in the distance cranes hovered over the an unfinished mammoth new stadium. Between these points the 35^th Street Viaduct sliced across a broad no-man’s land dominated by the ruins of the Milwaukee Road Yards, a locomotive and railcar manufacturing and repair facility abandoned in the 1980s.

Around the crumbling buildings I also could see wide, grassy meadows speckled with wildflowers—interspersed with gravel pits and piles of broken concrete.  Along the steel-bracketed Menomonee River grew an expanding feral forest of box elder and other weedy trees. Over the next few years I found ways to explore the area, which wasn’t easy to reach. It became one of my favorite places to find what I termed “urban wilderness.” 

Jacques Vieau, a French fur trader, discovered the Menomonee Valley in 1795. I discovered a very different Menomonee Valley in 1999. But neither of us found anything new. Vieau, credited with being the first white settler in what is now Milwaukee, was preceded by no fewer than five distinct Indian tribes. When I first started to explore its urban wilderness the Valley had gone through two great periods of transformation at the hands of Vieau’s successors. The first replaced the original wild rice marsh with Milwaukee’s industrial powerhouse. The second resulted in the devastated landscape that confronted me the day I first went there.

Today, as I walk around a great sloping curve where Canal Street now proceeds down onto that former brownfield, I see notable consequences of continuing transformation. Nestled into the curve, fresh paint gleams on the Rishi Tea Company’s newly constructed factory. Rishi joins a growing number of businesses that have rediscovered the Valley, many of them right here on the former rail yards. It is no coincidence that these businesses are located along the sinuous strip of pavement that finally spans the distance from Falk to Miller Park. In fact, Canal Street has meant far more to the redevelopment of the Menomonee Valley than the average street.

When asked to describe a favorite Milwaukee street for a series in Art City on placemaking I immediately thought of Canal Street and the Menomonee Valley. Despite its storied history, for most Milwaukeeans it's the streets that cross over Canal on viaducts that have defined the Valley. The long-blighted valley floor, first with its noisy and smelly industries then later with its polluted river, crumbling buildings and vacant, often contaminated lots, was a place to avoid, a place that seemed not only unappealing but dangerous.

The Menomonee Valley was a dank, forbidding place that divided the city.

Until recently, that is. In the past 15 years the Menomonee Valley has undergone a remarkable—and well-planned—transformation. After decades of contraction, business and industry are expanding once again. The natural environment that suffered degradation while the Valley became “machine shop to the world” is being reintroduced. Perhaps most surprisingly, the Valley now attracts 10 million visitors a year to recreational and entertainment destinations.

To a large extent, the redesign and extension of Canal Street made all of this possible.

In 1999 when I first saw the Milwaukee Road Yards you could not drive the four-mile length of the Menomonee Valley. Canal Street languished beneath the viaducts as a dusty, deteriorating alley that provided truck access to the few remaining industries. Near 32^nd St. the pavement ended abruptly atop a truncated ramp overlooking the urban wilderness.

The Harley-Davidson Museum

Today Canal Street is a continuous four-lane road that connects the Harley Davidson Museum on the Valley’s east end with Miller Park on the west. Significantly, the roadway is flanked by the Hank Aaron State Trail, a unique urban park. By bike or on foot, the trail is the best way I’ve found to experience the resurgent vitality of this place.

Miller Park

Commuters drive and cycle their way in both directions along Canal and the bike trail. But they do far more than provide access to workplaces and recreational venues in the Valley. Together they have helped create a new, inviting and forward-looking identity for the Menomonee Valley.

The Valley is now recognized locally and nationally as a model of economic and environmental sustainability. Canal Street has been a catalyst for cultural as well as economic development. Public arts programming has brought performances as well as temporary installations and permanent sculptures.

"Nature Belle," temporary public sculpture by Roy Staab, 2006

Since most of the viaducts still sweep over the Menomonee Valley, access is one of the keys to its revitalization. Geographically and functionally isolated, disconnected from the municipal street grid, and handicapped by a legacy of negative perception, simply bringing people down to the Valley and enabling free movement once there has been a major accomplishment. The new Sixth Street Bridges provide gateways into the valley but it is Canal Street that physically and symbolically creates a unified whole.

Stormwater Park & Industrial Center

The street winds past the Palermo Pizza factory, under the 35^th Street Viaduct and around an industrial center, which has risen atop the former Milwaukee Road Yards. I walk beside the road on the Hank Aaron Trail, through Stormwater Park. The path arcs gracefully among tall golden coneflowers, brushy shrubs, and young oak and maple trees. I pause at a railing overlooking a pond. A heron rises abruptly from the reeds, sails off over the resuscitated river.

The newly unified Valley is in the midst of another great transformation. It is not only being revitalized but also reimagined. By design it is a place where economic development is tied to environmental restoration, community needs, and cultural assets. I believe the Menomonee Valley truly embodies an exciting vision for sustainable urban development. It all began with Canal Street.

An edited version of this essay first appeared in Art City. To see it there click here. I want to thank Mary Louise Schumacher for inspiring this essay and creating the placemaking series on Art City.

Photo Essay (all photos 2014 except as noted)

The end of Canal St., circa 2003

Construction of Canal St. overpass, 2006

Public art on Hank Aaron Trail, circa 2005 (taken 2014)

Fundraising run/walk on Canal St. and Hank Aaron Trail, 2007

Hank Aaron Trail & Canal St. looking west from 6th St.

High Rise Bridge spanning the Valley

27th St. Viaduct and Menomonee River

35th St. Viaduct

25th St. roundabout and Potawatomi hotel under construction

City Yards at 25th and Canal

27th St. Viaduct, Canal St. & CP Rail from bike trail

Stormwater Park in action after rainfall in June

Canal Street extension winds into the west end of the Valley around Rishi Tea factory and under the 35th St. Viaduct.

This post is one in a series that relates to my Menomonee Valley Artist in Residency. For more information about the residency and links to previous posts and photographs, go to MV AiR.