Once Tattered, N. Commerce St. is Becoming a Neigh

Ten years ago, if you had predicted N. Commerce St. would be fertile ground for condo buyers, you probably would have been laughed out of the room. Who, except stray cats and the occasional skunk, would want to live in this derelict industrial corridor hard by the Milwaukee River on the northern edge of the downtown?

No one's laughing now. Scarcely five years after planners laid out the scheme for a dense, walkable neighborhood there, cleaned-up Commerce St. - officially, the Beerline neighborhood, in a nod to the former Schlitz Brewing Co. buildings nearby - has become the city's latest hotbed of residential construction. More than $120 million worth of private investment has been built or is in the works, including 650 condo units, and a new stretch of RiverWalk.

Well-heeled empty nesters and young professionals, many of them ex-suburbanites, are snapping up stylish row houses along the river and mansion-like condos on the steep bluffs above; prices range from the low $200,000s to $500,000 and up.

Soon, the first batch of more affordable condos and single-family homes for buyers with young children will take root here. A cafe and specialty food store are also in the works, along with a striking new footbridge underneath the Holton St. viaduct, linking the area with Brady St.

"It has all the elements that make great cities: diversity, continuity, public amenities," says Mayor John O. Norquist.

Until recent years, the site had none of the above. Much of the soil was contaminated, a legacy of the tanneries and other industries that had sprung up here along the now-filled-in 1836 spine of what Byron Kilbourn, one of Milwaukee's founders, had hoped would become a canal linking the Milwaukee, Rock and Mississippi rivers. The canal went belly up after only a mile, eclipsed by the railroads; over the years, industries shut down, leaving a scruffy wasteland.

In the late 1990s, entrepreneur Russ Klisch looked at a century-old former power plant and city forestry building at 1872 N. Commerce St. as a good site for his budding Lakefront Brewery. "I lost my first banker when he found out we wanted to move down here," Klisch recalls. "He didn't want to put any money into it."

Today, the brewery, with its Cream City brick corbeling, is one of the jewels of the street, churning out Klisch's specialty brews and drawing crowds to an engaging interior palm garden for Friday night fish fries and special events.

Cheap loans and location
So what accounts for Commerce St.'s remarkable turnaround?

Low interest rates helped. But key players attribute much of the boom to a happy marriage of far-sighted planning and location, location, location: 20 waterfront acres, including bluffs with commanding views, within minutes of downtown.

A master plan for the area was started in 1997 by San Francisco architect Dan Solomon and fleshed out by City Planning Director Peter Park in consultation with neighbors. The plan envisioned a compact mix of apartments, row houses, condos and single-family homes, with pathways to the river and a network of bike trails, public squares and connections to Brewers Hill and surrounding neighborhoods. New Urbanism, as this approach to planning is known, aims to promote a sense of community and discourage auto-dependent suburban sprawl.

Building heights were limited to five stories, so as not to overwhelm nearby housing. Facades were to be friendly to the street, with parking mostly underground; porches and balconies were encouraged.

"You do a good plan and it actually accelerates development," Park says.

Strength in numbers
Developers seem to agree. They especially like the predictability offered by the plan.

"The fact that there was a coordinated scheme for the entire corridor was a huge incentive to make a long-range investment. Without that plan, we would have felt like a Lone Ranger, not knowing what could develop next door," said Bob Monnat, chief operating officer for The Mandel Group, which is building the 126-unit Trostel Square apartment and condo project at Commerce and Vine streets and another riverfront housing development between N. Humboldt and E. North avenues.

"It writes a good story," Monnat adds, "when lenders know that subsequent development will underwrite the quality of the first loan they make."

Architect John Vetter is of a similar mind. "In a lot of ways the city did the preliminary work that a developer would have to do - identifying the property, getting the zoning changes approved," says Vetter, of Legacy Vetter Denk Partnership, which is building Commerce St.'s 63-unit River Homes condos and is planning several other housing developments nearby. "That made things a lot easier for us."

No set styles
Developers weren't told what style to build in - "You can't legislate good taste," Park says - but Vetter Denk Architects set the tone at River Homes with modernist forms, such as glass curtain walls, cantilevered roofs and simple geometry, in contrast to the fussier neo-traditional designs that marked the previous generation of downtown housing.

"People who want to live downtown are voting with their pocketbooks," says Monnat of The Mandel Group, whose Trostel Square condos, designed by the Engberg Anderson Design Partnership, are also sleekly modern. "Buyers don't want the same old, same old, anymore."

Commerce St.'s freedom from uniformity was encouraged by the city's decision to invite developers to compete for each parcel of land, rather than rely on a single company to rebuild the entire riverfront corridor. As many as eight firms were vying for some properties.

"That raised the bar for design," says Legacy's Rod Engel.

Still, this was no easy site to develop. Bluff land had to be expensively regraded, contaminants cleaned up, methane vented, old foundations excavated. At the center of Trostel Square, demolition debris from the old Trostel Tannery was encapsulated beneath what will become a public plaza.

Because of the unstable soils, buildings had to be constructed on pilings sunk down as far as 50 feet into glacial till. Developers also had to build a new dock wall for the RiverWalk, at a cost of as much as $1,500 a lineal foot.

And there were no guarantees that the risks of building there would pay off. Boris Gokhman, whose New Land Enterprises built the posh 16-unit Crescent condominiums atop the bluff on Hubbard St., remembers a couple of nervous buyers pulling out of initial sales in 1999, when the surroundings were still rough.

"We had eight months without a sale," he says. "Then, all of a sudden, it took off like someone had opened the faucets - whoosh! We couldn't build them fast enough."

As condos sprouted on long-fallow land, some residents of nearby Brewers Hill and Riverwest grumbled about loss of green space and also about gentrification: the displacement of longtime residents as nearby property values shoot up.

City officials say usable parkland in the area has actually increased. And developers argue that surrounding neighborhoods are among the gainers from Commerce St.'s rebirth.

"The equity in their homes is growing much faster than the rate at which they had invested," Vetter says. "And Commerce Street has been turned from a big eyesore into an urban asset."

He wonders: What's not to like about that?

By WHITNEY GOULD
of the Journal Sentinel staff

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 17, 2002