Piecing together a vibrant city

Park saw big picture while reinventing urban landscape of Milwaukee
By WHITNEY GOULD
wgould@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Dec. 25, 2003
Milwaukee - With his rimless specs, tweed jacket and low-key manner, Peter Park could pass for a graduate teaching assistant.

But the appearance is misleading: Together with his boss, Mayor John O. Norquist, the departing city planning director has made Milwaukee a national model of how to reinvent communities battered by freeways, demolition and suburbanization. His admirers liken Park to Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, the farsighted planner who rebuilt 19th-century Paris.

Following on the heels of Norquist, who is resigning at the end of this month to run the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism, the 40-year-old Park leaves office after eight years in January to become manager of community planning and development in Denver. Developers, architects and city officials say he will be a tough act to follow.

"Like Haussmann, he has left an extraordinary mark on the city that will be felt for decades, if not longer," says Julilly Kohler, a Brady St. developer and community activist. "Peter brought a refined aesthetic eye, an almost mathematical sense of proportion, to how things fit together. And he combined it with the power of the practical."

"He is perhaps the most irreplaceable person in the Department of City Development," says Ald. Mike D'Amato, who represents Milwaukee's east side. "He's a visionary, and they're hard to come by."

One of the most visible signs of Park's wide-ranging influence is the booming Beerline redevelopment along Commerce St. He fleshed out a plan conceived by San Francisco planner Dan Solomon, reconnecting this burned-out industrial area to adjacent neighborhoods such as Brewers Hill and Brady St. and inserting amenities such as a boathouse with a park on top.

Norquist says the resulting explosion of condos, apartments and now, single-family homes, represents an investment of more than $200 million.

"Peter did the fine-grain detail work that made it all possible," says the mayor, who credits Park more broadly with giving him the technical tools to fight off pavement-happy engineers and bottom-line development schemes.

Developer Gary Grunau says one of Park's greatest strengths was that attention to detail. "You create a better urban environment piece by piece - by worrying about the little things: where a wall is going to be, where a park bench is located," Grunau said. "Peter brought that sensitivity. It helped make this a more beautiful city."

But Park never lost sight of the big picture. In addition to the Beerline, a partial list of projects he had a major hand in includes the plans to revitalize the Menomonee Valley, another former brownfield, for light industry and recreation, and to rebuild the land beneath the recently demolished Park East freeway spur. The latter had its genesis in a class Park taught at the School of Architecture and City Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Park also spearheaded a master plan for the entire downtown that emphasizes new housing and walk-able development. And he undertook a user-friendly overhaul of the city's formerly impenetrable zoning code.

Other redevelopment plans in the works with Park's stamp focus on the area around Fond du Lac and North avenues; the near west side; Walker's Point and the nearby old Fifth Ward; and an update of the guidelines for development in the Historic Third Ward.

To the uninitiated, all this emphasis on planning can make eyes glaze over. But Park, who used to help run a planning and design business, said in an interview that elevating the importance of planning is one of his proudest achievements.

Planning creates predictability for developers and for residents of changing neighborhoods, he says, and "gets people genuinely excited about the future. It establishes confidence in the city. People begin to believe that good things can happen when they see there's a plan for it."

His other credo: "Design matters." In Park's mind, that translates into buildings that hug the street, with lots of windows and with well-defined entrances; housing and commercial development that tucks parking out of the way and encourages walking; and a balance between respect for the past and an openness to modernist innovation.

"Peter has allowed architects to do buildings of their own time," says Ursula Twombly of Continuum Architects & Planners, one of a new generation of modernists whom Park has nurtured both in his city planning role and as a teacher at UWM, where he earned master's degrees in architecture and planning.

"He got a lot of young architects excited about staying in Milwaukee instead of moving on to other cities," Twombly said. "We're losing a great leader."

Bob Greenstreet, Park's boss at UWM's architecture school, agrees. "Every building, every development is a little better these days than it would have been without Peter," says Greenstreet, now the campus' interim chancellor.

Even some developers whom Park has second-guessed are singing his praises.

Bob Monnat, chief executive officer of the Mandel Group, says Park's gentle but persistent prodding improved the design for Mandel's Trostel Square development, 120 units of condos and apartments along the Beerline.

"He persuaded us to leave 40% of the site undeveloped and publicly accessible and still get the density we needed to make it viable," Monnat says. "He didn't come across as dictatorial or professorial."

A couple of other examples: Park insisted that the Jewel-Osco company redesign a famously contentious supermarket at North and Humboldt avenues to include windowed retail space along North Ave. (now occupied by a Columbia St. Mary's medical clinic), instead of an unfriendly blank wall; he coaxed another developer to make the plans for Midtown Center (formerly the Capitol Court mall) more sensitive to the neighborhood.

"Without his input, many of our older commercial districts would have been replaced by ugly big boxes," says D'Amato. "He helped people understand the value of our older infrastructure."

Kohler, who has occasionally tangled with Park in her role as a member of the City Plan Commission, says he won people over with his calm, soft-spoken manner, his listening skills and problem-solving savvy. "He takes you through an issue logically, step by step," she says. "He has done an awful lot with a very light hand and a lot of patience."

It's hard to find anyone who will criticize Park publicly. Some developers complain privately that he was too picky; on the other side, some activists grumble that he was too friendly to development.

But Jim Shields, an architect who teaches at UWM and had Park as his star pupil at the University of Arizona, says both are bum raps. Park, he says, helped clear away obstacles to high-quality development and brought professional expertise to a job that had tended to attract political cronies. In the bad old days, Shields recalls, Park's agency was an encrusted bureaucracy known as the "Department of Construction Delays."

One group that has clashed with Park is the Urban Open Space Foundation, a Madison-based non-profit that advocates a "green infrastructure" as one of the building blocks for renewal areas such as the Park East corridor.

David Behrendt, a spokesman for the group, faults the Park East plan for treating open spaces - greenways, vest-pocket parks and plazas - more as afterthoughts than as important assets that can add value to the downtown.

"Peter is very competent and precise," says Behrendt, the retired editorial page editor of the Milwaukee Journal. "What he focuses on, he is very good at. But he is more focused on elements of the built environment than on the unbuilt realm. He hasn't got the balance quite right yet."

Park, in defense, says he doesn't see open space and buildings as either / or. But he says it's premature to zero in on open space before streets and blocks are laid out and before the city, which is not in the parks business, has figured out who is going to pay for and maintain amenities.

So where did this Chicago native, who grew up in tiny Pierre, S.D., develop his passion for city-building?

The youngest of three children to a radiologist father and a pediatrician mother, both immigrants from Korea, he credits his parents and travel to European and American cities.

"My parents came to Pierre looking for a little calm," he said, "but they wanted to introduce their children to the bigger world. So they'd take us out of school for a week each year when they went to conferences in Chicago or New York and we'd go to concerts, museums or a show. It's what got me excited about architecture and the way it can shape human settlements."

In Denver, he will supervise a staff of 200, compared with 50 in Milwaukee. And he will face new challenges and opportunities in a rapidly growing city that, unlike Milwaukee, has managed to build a light rail system and lay plans for its expansion. Park will keep his town / gown connections intact with a teaching appointment at the University of Colorado in architecture, planning and urban affairs.

What happens to city planning in Milwaukee after Park and Norquist exit is a source of some apprehension among those in the design community. Norquist, for one, insists he isn't too worried. Although some developers are already nibbling around the edges of the city's pedestrian-oriented zoning, the mayor says most recognize the value of the city's approach.

"They are realizing that the city is not the suburbs," he says, "and that you can make a lot more money with quality than with schlock."

Park is hopeful that Norquist's successor will be similarly attuned. "If the next mayor doesn't see that," he cautions, "the development community has a lot to worry about."




From the Dec. 26, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel