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Transforming Milwaukee's Menomonee River Valley

– Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension Wisconsin 4-H. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Corey Zetts. Corey is the executive director of the Menomonee Valley Partners in Milwaukee. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and went to high school at Brecksville High School. And then she went to John Carroll University in Cleveland to study philosophy.

She continued her studies in philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, and then she got a master’s degree in urban planning here at UW-Madison. Tonight, she’s gonna be speaking with us about transforming the Menomonee Valley. Would you please join me in welcoming Corey Zetts to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

– Thanks so much! I’m really excited to share the story of Milwaukee’s Menomonee River Valley and its transformation. We’ll spend the first half talking about the transformation, and then talk about some of the lessons learned. So the Menomonee River Valley is located right in the heart of Milwaukee, just west of Lake Michigan and downtown Milwaukee. It’s surrounded by some of the largest destinations in the region, like American Family Field, Potawatomi Hotel and Casino, and the Harley-Davidson Museum. But historically, the Menomonee River Valley was all a wild rice marsh. The word Menomonee comes from the Algonquin words for manoomin, meaning good grain. It’s where the Native tribes who lived all around the Valley and throughout the Great Lakes would gather every year for the wild rice harvest.

The first permanent white trading post in Wisconsin was at the bluffs of the Valley, where the Mitchell Park Domes sit today, where Jacques Vieux came and traded with the Potawatomi and other tribes during the harvest. So the Valley’s really been a great business location for more than 175 years. And the city of Milwaukee grew up around the Valley. In the 1830s, after the Potawatomi, who had become the dominant tribe in the Milwaukee region, were displaced through the Treaty of Chicago, the City of Milwaukee’s forefathers took on a massive public improvement project they called the Menomonee Improvements, where they undertook the filling of the marshland. They tore down the bluffs of the Valley with horse and cart, and brought the dirt to fill the marsh, as well as a lot of industrial farm stockyard cattle waste. So through a long and pretty arduous, and not always sanitary process, the Valley’s marsh was filled. The wetland became land, and it made way for industrial development. For more than 100 years, Milwaukee was known as the Machine Shop of the World, and during that time, the Valley was its engine. Everything that made Milwaukee famous, from grain to transformation of cattle into meat and tanned hides, to fabrication of metals into large gear products and mining equipment, all that happened in the Valley, and the city grew up around it. The neighborhoods established themselves surrounding the Valley as walk to work housing, and became the densest, most densely populated neighborhoods in the state of Wisconsin.

But for generations of Milwaukeeans, as well as people just passing through Milwaukee, this is what was seen. And this was the legacy of the Valley that people recall to this day. As industries started leaving, some moving out to the suburbs, some overseas, and some just shutting doors permanently, the Valley was left with hundreds and hundreds of acres of abandoned factories, contaminated land, and a forgotten river. It also became the place that uses that residents didn’t want anywhere else in the city were put. So stockyards, junkyards, scrap yards, things that residents didn’t want in their neighborhoods all became, the Valley became the location for all those uses. And the Menomonee River, once a wild marsh that fed hundreds of people, became a channelized and forgotten source of water. The river itself had no public access in the city of Milwaukee. Very few places, you could even see it, because it was bordered by private land or tall sheet pile walls. And the few places it was visible were really filled with garbage, and looked more like an open sewer than an actual river. And adding to the economic devastation the Valley saw in the latter half of the 20th century, the environmental issues were real community issues.

The Menomonee Valley was, for generations, known as the Mason-Dixon Line of Milwaukee. It was the divide between Milwaukee’s Black and white communities. And just over 50 years ago, NAACP youth, Father Groppi, and a number of other city leaders led marches across the Valley, across the 16th Street viaduct, in an effort to see a fair housing bill passed that would end segregation in the city. So for 200 consecutive nights, people marched across the Valley to demand fair housing. So in the late 1990s, as the economic, environmental, and community cultural needs all came to a head, community leaders went to the city and asked for a real plan for what would happen with the Menomonee Valley. There were hundreds of acres of neglected land. The communities, neighborhoods surrounding the Valley were hit hard by job loss, unemployment, under employment, and public health issues that went along with that. There was no access to the river. And the businesses who remained still didn’t know if they had a long-term future, because this was the place that any unwanted use came. So together, the community came together and demanded a plan, really asking for improved infrastructure, support for the businesses that were there, focus on potentially catalytic projects to bring additional development, and also, recommended a public/private partnership to implement everything that was in the plan, knowing that these changes were bigger than anything that the city could do on its own.

So in 1999, Menomonee Valley Partners was born as that public-private partnership to implement the plan and really focus on the economic, environmental, and community issues of the area in the Menomonee River Valley and beyond, with a goal to revitalize and sustain the Valley as a thriving urban district that advances economic, ecological, and social equity for the greater Milwaukee community. So now, I’ll just run through some of the changes that have transpired in this 20 years of transformation. The first big projects that happened in the Valley, as envisioned in that original plan more than 20 years ago, were infrastructure improvements. So on the very east end of the Valley was the 6th Street viaduct. There were four viaducts that crossed the Valley, and very few ways down into. So for generations, the Valley was a place that people passed over, and only if you had a job down there would you have reason to go down there. So one of the first big efforts was to undertake bringing one of those viaducts down to grade and to touch the Valley floor, making it a place that people went to, rather than crossed over. And that 6th Street viaduct was rebuilt as the 6th Street bridges that cross over but touch down on the Valley. And those bridges landed on Canal Street, which was surrounded by vacant land. It was a huge leap of faith to design this bridge to go to a place that really had very little, but it was also a signal that this was a place that had much yet to come, and a place that had a future that was yet to unfold.

So those 6th Street bridges really were the first indicator that the Valley was on a forward path. And today, those 6th Street bridges are often filled with people. There are bike lanes, and they connect to major destinations. This here is one of the Harley-Davidson anniversary parties, where the bridge is filled with bikers, people from across Milwaukee, from across Wisconsin, and from around the world who come to destinations via the 6th Street bridges. So I think we’ve really seen that transformation through infrastructure as that first step. And the second big piece of the infrastructure transformation was the rebuilding of Canal Street, which was done as a mitigation project for the rebuilding of the Marquette Interchange at I-94 and I-43. Before then, Canal Street did not run all the way through the Valley. In fact, there was no road that would take you from the east end to the west end. You had to get up to the bluffs through the neighborhoods to find another way down. There was no single east-west street.

And where there was a Canal Street running east-west, there were railroad tracks right down the middle of it. So if you were trying to get to work, get a shipment in, you might have to wait for a train passing to get into your business. So Canal Street’s reconstruction was transformative. You can see, those two photos are taken from the same vantage point on the 16th Street viaduct, overlooking the Valley. And what was really a big step and a real success in this was, not only was Canal Street rebuilt to provide vehicular access east and west to the whole Valley, but through a partnership with the Department of Natural Resources, the Hank Aaron State Trail was constructed as part of that effort as well, since the goal was really to create family-supporting jobs in the Valley once again, bring companies back, and make them available to people in the surrounding communities. And we knew that, through all the disinvestment in the neighborhoods, not everyone had access to a private car, had an easy way down to work, that creating a bike and walking trail that people could walk through the length of the Valley was important, as a workforce piece, but also, with the hopes for environmental restoration and creation of public access to the river, that having a trail that connected people to natural resources was a goal as well. So at the same time, these two projects were built: Canal Street and the Hank Aaron State Trail, that parallel each other and provide access throughout the entire Valley. And today, we say that “The trail will take you there. ” 12 of the top 15 destinations in southeast Wisconsin are right along the Hank Aaron State Trail. So from Lake Michigan, the Milwaukee Art Museum and Discovery World, the Harley-Davidson Museum, American Family Field, State Fair Park, all these destinations you can get to off-road on a trail, all the way to the Milwaukee-Waukesha county line, where it meets up with another trail system.

So really providing a spine east-west that connects workers to jobs, as well as families to all the destinations that they’d want to see in the region. So around that same time, work started on riverfront lands. Most of the riverfront was, for almost 100 years, was coal: coal storage for a coal gasification plant, a coal power plant. And seeing that land transform was one of the first milestones that showed that the Valley was really bringing back economic development. So that first big project was the construction of Marquette University’s Valley Fields. Today, right along the Menomonee River, a destination for sports, Division I soccer, but also, lots of community organizations that partner with Marquette to host their own games here. And that became a catalyst, and development continued east along other former coal yards, and we’ve seen more private businesses move in. This one here shows just one of the examples of where we’ve had former vacant land redeveloped, private businesses come in, who then give an easement for the Hank Aaron State Trail to run in the back of their property, providing public access to the Menomonee River. So on any given day, we’ll see bikers and walkers, dog walkers, people fishing behind some of the private properties right here, because there was public access reestablished along the river. And then, up until 2004, we had stockyards.

The mighty Milwaukee stockyards were right in the heart of the Valley. Cows and pigs that were here for their final days before moving into the nearby slaughterhouses to be processed into ground beef, and then hides moved to the Valley’s tanneries, to come out as leather products. Back in 2004, we still had businesses down here in the Valley complaining about cows and pigs breaking out and blocking their loading docks, or employees having a hard time getting to work because some cows were out in the street. But the rest of the time, cows had these downtown skyline views. And so, through a lot of partnerships, that land was acquired and redeveloped as the Canal Street Commerce Center, which now has over 200 employees, largely in light assembly, light manufacturing, and tech uses, really, again, bringing jobs right back to the site, and a more productive economic use, and a real generator of jobs for the community. On the east end of the Valley, the next big project was the redevelopment of a peninsula right at the confluence of the Menomonee River and the South Menomonee Canal, one of the two remaining canals from the days when the Valley had nearly a dozen canals for private industry shipping and unloading. That site, about 20 acres, was the home of Morton Salt. So we had salt piles right here, on the water, again, not the highest and best use of waterfront land. But through partnerships that involved combining a number of small properties to make one contiguous site there, that property was redeveloped as the one and only Harley-Davidson Museum, which today brings more than a quarter million visitors to the region every year, for the museum itself and the number of events that are held there. So that’s been another big economic driver and a catalyst for development all around it.

And the biggest project by far in the Valley has been the redevelopment of the former Milwaukee Road Shop site. So the Milwaukee Road, I think a lot of people in Wisconsin remember those trains going through our state, all the way to the Pacific, bearing the Milwaukee Road logo. But in ’86, the shops were closed, trains ceased being manufactured and repaired here. And for more than 20 years, we were left with this abandoned factory. This was one of the first things you saw coming into Milwaukee from the west. And today, that site is the Menomonee Valley Industrial Center and Community Park. We have a dozen businesses there, providing more than 1,400 family-supporting jobs and a really innovative green infrastructure system that captures every drop of rain that falls on the businesses and the roadways, collects it in the shared stormwater treatment system that’s in the foreground of the Business Park photo here, as a very engineered way of getting back to the Valley’s original purpose of being a wetland that cleaned and filtered water, and also provides park space, trails, soccer fields, a number of uses that the community really wanted to see, both jobs and public space for our neighbors to enjoy. And as that project was developing, jobs were coming back, companies were hiring, and the park space was being developed. From the nearby neighborhoods, you could see it, but you couldn’t get there, because all of the historic connections between the Valley and the neighborhoods, which were once walk to work housing, had disappeared, bridges had come down. And there was really no connectivity anymore.

So as that was happening, neighbors, neighborhood associations, the city, the state, both the Department of Transportation and Natural Resources, Menomonee Valley Partners worked together to figure out how to reconnect those. And today, there is a bridge, the Valley Passage, that connects the Menomonee Valley across the river to the Silver City neighborhood immediately south, in the same location as the historic connections between the neighborhoods. That bridge is really, again, a walk to work way for neighbors to get to jobs, as well as a way for residents to get to the park space and to the river. And really, we’re seeing more and more people from throughout the community using this infrastructure to connect. From the neighborhood side, in Silver City, that connection, for more than a generation, was a boarded up tunnel, because it connected under railroad tracks. And so it was really also a blight on the neighborhood. But today, that Valley Passage connection is a switchback trail that connects neighbors and works as a gathering spot, a place where people come together and then meet before walking over to the Valley. And the environmental progress continued throughout this. And I think as more neighbors, more residents began building faith in the Valley, knowing that the transformation was really gaining momentum, that companies were moving back, jobs were being created, there was some green space being created, that the demand really grew for improving the Menomonee River itself, its water quality, as well as the public access to it. So this image is the Menomonee River in 1997, around the time that Miller Park was originally being reconstructed.

So you can see, there were tall sheet pile walls that really kept people away from the water itself. It was brown and murky, and really, not a place that many people could see, so there really wasn’t a lot of recognition that we had this river here as a potential resource. And when you did see it, it was not an inviting place. But this is that same stretch today. You know, just over 15 years later, we have kids in there. These two boys are sampling for a macroinvertebrates through a school program with the Urban Ecology Center, capturing small little critters in the water that are indicators of water health. And the quality of the river has changed immensely, that these kids are demonstrating in the small creatures that they can capture with their dip nets. But we’re also seeing that in the return of some of the big species. So if you come to visit the Valley in the spring, April, you’ll see the steelhead running. And in September and October, we have a really incredible salmon run.

And in the same stretch, right behind the ballpark, you can see people pulling out three-foot salmon during the fall salmon run. So it’s really become an amazing story of resilience. As we’ve seen, the types of restoration efforts that have happened in the Valley lead to increase in species, and those species are drawing community down. And that restoration and transformation in the Valley has also been moving out, moving its way into the surrounding neighborhoods. So this former bar, abandoned in the neighborhood right next to that original connection with the bridge and the tunnel that connected the Silver City neighborhood to the south, right into the Valley. This was a former bar with a rooming house above, where employees of the Milwaukee Road worked. As plans developed for park space and river access, there was demand in the community for an Environmental Community Center, something that really helped neighbors to get out and explore the natural resources that they had been cut off from for generations. And so, that same building still stands today, after quite a renovation, as the Menomonee Valley branch of the Urban Ecology Center, a community center and environmental education center that partners with schools within a two-mile radius. So there are 22 schools surrounding the Valley that get to come in for their hands-on science education through the Urban Ecology Center, using this building as the gateway into the park and the river to do everything from sampling water quality in the river, to learning about the birds, and the bats, and reptiles that they can find in the habitat that is being restored in the Valley, as well as community programs that run from early morning bird walks to late night bat and owl walks, really inviting the community in to experience and explore a public space. And the biggest public space that opened the year after the Urban Ecology Center opened, was Three Bridges Park.

This was a transformation of the former rail switching yard of the Milwaukee Road Shops, and a transformation of an abandoned rail yard that was, again, a barrier between neighborhoods and the restoration in the Valley, and a barrier between neighborhoods and the river. So historically, that whole area was part of the Milwaukee Road Shops. And on the very right side, you can see where the railroad switching yard was. So there were more than a dozen tracks there, where the cars would line up. In the early 2000s, when the Marquette Interchange was reconstructed, fill from that project, as well as crushed concrete from the old highway, was moved to this site. There were a couple of benefits with that. First, it raised the entire site out of the floodplain. That enabled it to be redeveloped. But secondly, it created some interesting topography, and some height that enabled connections between the Valley and the surrounding neighborhoods, which were still up on a bluff. And that’s the site of Three Bridges Park today.

And you can see that those dirt piles and crushed concrete from the Marquette Interchange have been shaped through a partnership with the UWM School of Geology. We found a way to turn those piles into eskers and canes and drumlins, the glacial topography that was indigenous to southeast Wisconsin that had been lost when much of this area was redeveloped and the landforms were flattened to make way for industry and other development. So today, those landforms are recreated, and to scale. So kids who are coming through their school programs to the Urban Ecology Center can learn about how the glaciers moved through Wisconsin and created features like drumlins and canes and eskers, and do some of that work right in the park space. But it also lets the neighborhood connect across the still-existing rail line, that still is there to cross over with bike and pedestrian bridges, by landing on some of those features. So in these last 20 years, the Valley has really gone from an eyesore and really, an embarrassment for the state of Wisconsin, into a national model of economic development and environmental restoration. In that time, we’ve seen more than 300 acres of land be redeveloped, bringing more than 60 companies back to the Valley. And those companies moving here have created more than 5,200 family-supporting jobs for residents throughout the region. What was really thought of as a dirty, contaminated area now boasts more than a million square feet of sustainably-designed buildings, many of them with LEED certification, so very environmentally friendly, and now, 60 acres of public parks and trails, including the Hank Aaron State Trail, that wind through the Valley. And today, a place that really had few access points and very few people coming to it for any reason at all now boasts more than 10 million visitors a year, between the large attractions, like Brewers games, Potawatomi Hotel and Casino, Harley-Davidson Museum, as well as the Urban Ecology Center, Three Bridges Park, and the Hank Aaron State Trail.

And it’s really become a place for everyone. And it’s now getting all kinds of national attention. So just a few examples. Smithsonian magazine recently ran an article about Milwaukee’s secret salmon runs. That Menomonee River stretch that was just nothing but sheet pile wall and few species just 20 years ago is now boasting incredible salmon runs that are getting national attention as a great urban fishery. POLITICO magazine did a feature on the Valley a few years ago, about how Milwaukee is really a model for other former Rust Belt cities. We’ve shaken off the rust and kept going, developing the industrial heritage that we have here, but also greening it up all around. And Landscape Architecture magazine did a feature on the Valley as well, saying that this area, with all its industrial history and still job generating industrial growth today, is a model for landscape design, that we have really innovative systems here that deal with stormwater, that restore native species and habitats, and create public space. So from the environmental, to the economic, to the community, the Valley still keeps pushing forward and building momentum. So I want to turn now to what are the lessons we’ve learned from the Valley that could be replicated anywhere else, whether it’s at this scale, or smaller, or larger? So Menomonee Valley Partners took on a project with the Wisconsin Policy Forum a few years ago to really look at, what were the lessons we can learn from the Valley, and what can be replicated? And we still have work to do here, but we’ve had a lot of questions and tours from communities across the country, as well as some from overseas, who come to look at this mix of economic and environmental sustainability.

So the Wisconsin Policy Forum spent some time studying the Valley, talking to stakeholders, and looking at, what are things that we can learn from and share with other communities? So I thought I’d just run through these lessons learned. The first is the importance of robust planning and design activities that establish a common vision, and then having a roadmap to see that vision through. So the planning is so important, but also, all those steps to get from the vision to fruition. So for example, the former Milwaukee Road Shop site, that’s what you see here, when it was abandoned. This is about 2000. 120 acres of actual building space that was abandoned in the heart of the city. The goal here was a combination of economic development and environmental restoration. And so, the city of Milwaukee took on a national design competition for this land, because you don’t often get opportunities to develop sites this big in the heart of a city, and really wanted to make sure that we seized that opportunity and really maximized it. So design firms from across the country competed for a chance to design this, and really heard the input from the community, that said they wanted to see the return of family-supporting jobs, especially in manufacturing, because we have that skill base, and those jobs tend to pay family-supporting wages. But they also wanted access to the river and green space, because the neighborhoods surrounding the Valley have a lower percentage of green space than elsewhere in the community.

So this was the vision: half of the land going to industrial development, and half going to park space. Another big piece was managing stormwater where it falls. So Milwaukee, like many cities, is challenged to manage stormwater in heavy rain events. Especially as we think about resiliency and with climate change, how do we capture water where it falls and keep it from leading to really flashy rivers that rise fast, backing up into basements? So the goal here was really to capture every drop of rain in any storm event, up to a 100-year flood, collect it from the building rooftops, from the streets, and send it into a stormwater treatment system filled with native plants, similar to the original marshland and wetlands of the Valley, and let that hold that first flush of stormwater until it gradually was able to be soaked into the soils beneath, and also have trails running through that, so that you could still have access to the land up to a 100-year storm event. So this was the original concept, this was how it was designed. And about two years after the infrastructure was built, we did have a 100-year storm event, and the stormwater park functioned exactly as designed. It held that water, that first flush, and you can see how it looks like we’ve got a series of ponds lined up, parallel in Canal Street. But within two days, everything was dry. It held that water so it didn’t run into the river, or back up anywhere else, into sewer systems. But it treats it, so everything coming off, the contaminants from roadway waste, are captured so that by the time the water filters its way into the Menomonee River, it’s cleaned.

Another goal of that project, and part of that roadmap for how to get to that vision, was creating a plan for job creation, and what that impact of development really should be. So we knew that it would be easy to sell that land that was so close to highway infrastructure to developments for warehousing and distribution. And there are a lot of reasons it makes sense to put warehousing and distribution close to freeways, but when we also had the neighborhoods with the highest unemployment rates in the state within a three-mile radius, it became imperative to the city of Milwaukee that that land also be used for job creation. So the city of Milwaukee adopted a set of development objectives that really looked at the types of jobs, the wages for the jobs, and the job density. So you couldn’t build a big warehouse with a couple guys running a forklift. You had to have about 22 jobs per acre, which is in the mid to high range for manufacturing. So all of those jobs also had to pay what was set as the benchmark for a family-supporting wage, plus benefits. And that was a huge leap of faith by the city, to put standards on land that, you know, just a few years before, no one wanted to touch, and say that this will only be sold to companies who are bringing good jobs back to the city. And sticking to those guidelines, redirecting companies that didn’t quite fit to other areas in the community enabled the Menomonee Valley Industrial Center to actually exceed all of those goals. So the goal was to have 1,294 jobs, and now, we have well over 1,400.

And they pay good wages, and it’s really been a success story on the economic and job creation front. And that same project, the Menomonee Valley Industrial Center, has also been a success on the environmental front as well, because the same project had sustainable design guidelines adopted. So everything that’s been built, on this land that people thought was really dirty and potentially dangerous, has been built to these environmental standards that really set the tone for the future. So they’re green buildings. They all achieve different things through daylighting or energy efficiency. But we’ve seen that really be a success in having buildings that operate efficiently and sustainably also help to attract companies that were interested in sustainability as part of their business line. So what seemed like a really high hurdle early on, when sustainability was barely a buzzword, has really helped attract high-quality companies who are interested in being on a redeveloped brownfield, being part of a success story, and showcasing what about them is a sustainable company. And we’re still undertaking those lessons learned, because there’s still a lot of land left to develop, largely riverfront land. So like this, we can see that we still have vacant tracts of land right now that are just used for storage and construction staging, but that there is a vision for creating a mix of industrial and retail. The goal for the remaining land in the Valley is light food manufacturing, something that makes use of the industrial zoning, and the fact that you can run trucks and activity here 24/7, but also has some sort of front of factory retail where people can come either to a beer garden, or a restaurant, or a retail along the riverfront that activates that riverfront space.

We’ve seen a couple of breweries move back to the Valley, kind of fitting in with this vision for the land currently here. And we’re hoping that, in about five years, that vacant land will look like this, with new buildings, public access to the Menomonee River, a riverwalk, fishing piers, and more ways to get people activated in this space. The second big lesson that was taken away from the Wisconsin Policy Forum study was the importance of strong intergovernmental cooperation and public/private partnerships. One of those partnerships I mentioned a little bit ago was the partnership between the city of Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation in the reconstruction of the Marquette Interchange, and raising land out of the floodplain elsewhere in the Valley. So because those partners were at the table and talking to each other, they realized some synergies. The city had land in a floodplain that needed to be raised. The DoT had a lot of fill coming from the Marquette Interchange, and then the actual crushed concrete from the old highway itself. So together, that saved the city millions of dollars in infrastructure improvements. It also saved 75,000 truckloads of material from going to a landfill. It built the topography of Three Bridges Park as a teaching tool for the Urban Ecology Center and a connection point to connect across the railroad, into the neighborhoods.

And all that fill also lines both our roadways on Canal Street and the Hank Aaron State Trail. So every time you’re on the Hank Aaron State Trail through the Valley, that’s old Marquette Interchange you’re riding on, and just an example of a great partnership and bringing people together. And another example of that was the whole construction of Three Bridges Park. People often ask, “Is this city land, or county? Who manages this park?” And where we sit, that’s a simple question with a very complicated answer, because there are a lot of partners, even today, now that the park is built, who are responsible for managing it. This park was built as a combination of bike and walk to work routes from surrounding neighborhoods, as well as restoration of natural resources and public access to the Menomonee River, as well as an outdoor classroom for the Urban Ecology Center. So all these partners came together. The Department of Transportation actually built the park and its trails, the Department of Natural Resources manages the trail itself. The city of Milwaukee owns and maintains the bridges and lighting, and the Urban Ecology Center manages the landscapes, and Menomonee Valley Partners raised an endowment to fund the park in perpetuity. So managed that financial piece to maintain the landscapes in the park. So those partnerships between public and private entities and between public entities themselves have really been the strength.

And I think those partnerships from the early days and the infrastructure projects, like the Hank Aaron State Trail and Canal Street, continue today, in new and sometimes surprising ways. The next lesson learned was the importance of creatively assembling funding from numerous resources. So as an example, again, Three Bridges Park used funding from so many different places. There were partners who came together because it was a transportation connection, a workforce connection. There were some who came in with funding because it was about restoring natural resources, creating healthier waterways, and managing stormwater where it falls. Some partners were really interested in the environmental education, and some, especially in the science education. Where neighborhood schools may not have been always meeting standards and goals for science education for their students, having a place where students could really come and bring science to life by doing hands-on activities was inspiring. And some partners came because of the whole, the tackling of interconnected issues together. But that funding came in from so many different resources. This slide is just maybe a quarter of a long sheet that just shows how many different sources were involved in just building the infrastructure for Three Bridges Park.

There was transportation, there was environmental cleanup, there was infrastructure, and economic, and community, science is part of that funding mix. But really, the reason that this was successful was because all of this funding could be leveraged. One source leveraged another, and it was working together to really create a transformation as a whole. Another of the recommendations from the study was really aggressively marketing the existing strengths of the area. So in the early days of the Valley, when it was still mostly vacant land, mostly still-standing abandoned factories, a forgotten river, when it was just a vision of what it could be, that marketing was really important, and that was playing off of the strengths already there: the proximity to the resources, to downtown Milwaukee, to highway infrastructure to connect to markets like Chicago and Madison, the importance of having a deep water port nearby for manufacturers to ship goods around the world. Another piece of our strength was the workforce. The Valley was surrounded by a ready and willing workforce that had strong roots in manufacturing. The Midwest has a great work ethic, and we had great technical college systems and university systems willing to work with employers moving into the region to help upskill residents into the jobs that were available. So we really worked to market the workforce. And as time grew, we had new strengths to market.

As businesses started moving in, we really developed a tight business association. It took a certain type of person and a certain type of company to move here in the early days, when there was a lot of vision but not a lot of substance yet happening. And those were really pioneering people who were willing to dig in and be part of a change. And they’ve really worked to market the land and business location to fellow business owners, to talk to other potential employees about what it was like to work here, that it wasn’t what people perceived as being a dirty, dangerous place; that it was really a place where you could be part of change. And then today, we can market a whole ‘nother level of strengths. This is the stretch of the Menomonee River right by the ballpark. Employees often will go fishing before work, or on a lunch break, or after work, walk to catch a ballgame, go to a brewery. We have a lot of employers who do company-wide kayaking events or biking events on the trail, things that really are amenities that you couldn’t envision years ago, but from the beginning, marketing what assets you have. And some of those are much broader, like just the location, or proximity to workforce, but with time, those became much more tangible. Again, one of the other recommendations, and I think I’ve mentioned this a few times already, but it’s so important, and I think is woven throughout everything in the transformation story of the Valley, is addressing multiple community objectives at the same time.

I refer back to the old Milwaukee Road Shop site, which is now the Menomonee Valley Industrial Center, with more than 1,400 jobs, and Three Bridges Park, with acreage of park, and Hank Aaron State Trail, access points to the Menomonee River for kayaking, canoeing, and fishing, and the Urban Ecology Center. Really, these were all interconnected issues that Milwaukee as a community faced: the vacant land, the environmental issues on the vacant former industrial land, the lack of access to jobs, the difficulty of getting into the Valley, but tackling all of those at once, and really seeing this as a combined vision. So we worked as partners with Menomonee Valley Partners, the city of Milwaukee, the Departments of Transportation and Natural Resources, the Urban Ecology Center, and many others in the community to really look at this comprehensively. And that led to the leveraging of funding mentioned earlier, and it led to a lot more partners at the table, because people came for different reasons. Whether they were interested in education, or job access, or economic development, there was something here that connected. And so, the ability to take these not as silos, but to bring partners together to solve interrelated problems. The whole story of the Valley’s decline is an interrelated story of jobs moving and companies moving, and an environment that was put down at the bottom of the priority list. And the redevelopment and transformation of it is about undoing that, and taking on all of those issues simultaneously, and that’s been, really, a part of that success. And then, the recommendation that the Policy Forum noted as well, that was more of a struggle for us early on, was workforce development, to connect jobs to neighbors. In some ways, it seemed like that might happen organically.

Historically, when the Valley first developed and industry was just moving in, those neighborhoods grew up around the Valley’s walk to work housing, and the residents supported those companies. But after years of vacancy in the Valley and companies now returning, that connection was not organic. And so, it’s a lesson that we’ve been slowly learning, how to really make those connections between residents who are looking for jobs, or looking for that pathway to get to some of these more in-demand careers that require new skills and expertise, and how to connect the businesses here who may be coming in with existing partnerships and staffing agencies, or certain schools that they always hire from, how to reframe looking into the neighborhoods and connecting to those populations who live nearby, but aren’t being marketed to for those jobs. Because when you look at it, we’ve got this spatial mismatch. There are jobs right here in the Valley, but there are residents who don’t have good jobs, and they weren’t quite meeting. So a lot of the work that we’ve been doing now is really to make those connections, to bring the job fairs into the neighborhood, to create tours, both in-person and now online, to show what it’s really like, what a day in the life of working for a company is, what these types of careers actually look like, and also, to practice those skills, like interviewing. And so, we’re doing a lot more of that in the neighborhoods, and also, a lot of connecting students who live in the neighborhoods and are at high schools in the area to those career paths. We find a lot of students just don’t even know the range of jobs available in engineering, or manufacturing, or any of the more than 150 companies that are in the Valley today. So bringing them in for tours, having opportunities to see what it’s really like. And then, working with the schools as well, to transfer what students are learning in their classroom into real life application in a company.

So if you’re learning about torque and gears, or structures and basic engineering concepts, being able to do something hands-on at a company that puts those concepts to life, and then see how it’s actually used. We find that that’s really been eye-opening, that students today don’t have much visibility into what happens in a lot of different workplaces, most notably, manufacturing. But doing those hands-on projects really piques interest, and is helping to connect, even by word of mouth, what’s available, and what are those career paths worth pursuing here? So those were the main takeaways from the Wisconsin Policy Forum report, and then I just had a couple more, just from my own experience, to share. One was the importance of having vision and taking big leaps of faith. And so, I think the whole story of the transformation of Milwaukee’s Menomonee River Valley is about those two things. So it took a big vision to look at this site, this former Milwaukee Road Shop site, what you saw coming into Milwaukee, and really envision that being what the community wanted, both a center for jobs and outdoor recreation. And it took a leap of faith. The city acquired that property to make that possible, because it was, it was too important to leave to chance that someone would come in and redevelop that on their own, and find a way to balance those two seemingly conflicting, but actually really important uses, together. So today, this is that same site, with all of these jobs here, but also, that green space in front of the Industrial Center is used for soccer. So employees who work there might have kids on soccer teams, community members from the neighborhoods come in, kids from both sides of the Valley play together.

So ways that we’re overcoming that division, the Valley’s history of just being that divide, and bringing people together, both for jobs and for recreation, and just getting to know their neighbors. So that bridging was a huge leap of faith for the city to invest in this property. And then, on the environmental side as well, when our river looked like this, like something no one would actually think of as a river, for companies to move adjacent to this property and believe in that vision, that something would happen here, and take that leap of faith to be the first one to say, “I believe that this vision will happen, and that we need to be part of it. ” And that has come to fruition. Now we see people kayaking that same stretch on a regular basis, group tours, company outings on the river, neighborhood gatherings at the water. But that was all a big leap of faith, to believe that this could be possible here. Finally, knowing that this all takes perseverance, and then paying attention to the. . . Knowing that this large project, that these large transformations will take perseverance, and having the patience to see that through, as well as finding those small moments to celebrate along the way.

So one of the examples I use for that is the tree planting. It’s said that it takes 100 years to grow a 100-year-old tree, and sometimes, people forget that. It does, all of these things take time, and it took us generations to cycle through all that the Valley’s been through. But having children take part in that, to be that next generation growing trees, to plant them, finding those spaces where people can really dig in and build something for the next generation. Grandparents planting trees with their children is one of those moments we celebrate doing for what’s next. And finally, my final point is that all of these partnerships that are at the core take time, and trust, and good will, and you never know where those will lead. So from the creation of Three Bridges Park, to new projects today that we never would have envisioned, we find that those partnerships between all these different agencies, coming with different visions, different hopes, but the desire to really make our community stronger, has led us to new and better places. So taking that time to build trust and set a vision, and leverage resources together has really been part of that key element of success. So I’m really grateful that you joined me today for hearing about the transformation of Milwaukee’s Menomonee River Valley, and hope that you’ll have an opportunity to come down and visit it sometime in the future. Thank you so much for listening.