A 26-Building Redo

Tapping Into Milwaukee’s Pabst

By Elaine Schmidt

The Pabst Brewery site, an icon of Milwaukee’s brewing history, shut more than a decade ago, but activity is bubbling again at the 21-acre site.

The historic redevelopment project, called The Brewery, is under master development by Brewery Project LLC, and Joseph Zilber is the entity’s owner. The project is turning the Pabst complex’s remaining 26 buildings into a mixed-use development that preserves the site’s history.

Zilber bought the property in August 2006, after a failed redevelopment by another entity that was to have been known as Pabst City.

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Founded in 1844, Pabst was once the largest brewery in the country. Covering more than six city blocks—and once topping out at more than 50 buildings—the site still houses grain silos from the 1800s and the mid-1900s, a church from 1872 that was purchased by the brewery in an expansion and several century-plus buildings.

Perched on the highest point in downtown Milwaukee, several of the complex’s buildings are crenelated like European castles, giving parts of the site the look of a hilltop fortress.

The brewery has been silent since 1996.

“When Pabst closed, they simply turned out the lights and walked away,” says Dan McCarthy, vice president of Brewery Project LLC. “They left bottles on the bottling line, personal items in the locker room and papers and coffee cups on the desks. It looked like the people had dissolved and everything was left behind.

“By the end of 2006, Zilber had formed a partnership and had proposed rezoning to create a mixed-use, live/work/play environment,” McCarthy says. Now in his 90s, Zilber has referred to the project as his legacy.

The developers hope to see office, residential, retail, institutional, hotel and restaurant spaces on the site, including a high-end restaurant in the dramatic penthouse structure located atop its huge grain silos.
No overall cost has been announced in part because some plans have yet to solidify, nor has a completion date been announced for the same reason. Each of the extant buildings is expected to see some work.

A Year of Prep Work

Work has begun in some of the old structures and is nearing completion in a few. Multiple contractors are working at the site.

Most of the buildings still bear the signs of a century or more of hard use, from rusting steel to peeling plaster and paint and even a faint, lingering smell of hops in the old millhouse and brewhouse.

A year of site preparation, encompassing all of 2007, was required before any buildings could be turned over for redevelopment, McCarthy says. The work, some of which is continuing, included removal of brewing equipment and asbestos from the buildings.

In addition, infrastructure work is being done to create city streets where there were none before. The streets and sidewalks of the complex will “knit the land into the city in a way it never was in its previous life,” says Rocky Marcoux, Milwaukee’s Commissioner for the Department of City Development.

From the city’s perspective, the project is an enormous boon.

“There are few cities in the U.S. that have 21 acres of prime real estate like this in a prime downtown location,” Marcoux adds.

To the east of the brewery lies the Park East Corridor, a swath of several vacant city blocks awaiting development in the wake of the 2003 Park East Freeway demolition.

Greening the Brewery

Sustainability is big element of the Pabst project.

For example, about 200,000 of Milwaukee’s trademark “cream city brick”—fabricated more than a century ago with sand dredged from Lake Michigan—have been salvaged for reuse.

In addition, “pocket park” green spaces are included in the development’s plans, and porous paving stones that allow drainage of rainwater and soil recharge have been laid on pedestrian West Juneau Avenue.

Preservation of historic buildings and reuse of some more modern brewery buildings are part of the project’s focus on sustainability.

Brewing with Activity

The site is bustling with construction and demolition.

Old building foundations are being pulled out of the ground where possible, with the debris being crushed onsite for reuse. The dark facades of the historic buildings are getting a good scrub, revealing the buttery color of the cream city brick.

“We had a lot of scrubbing to do,” says Charles Trainer, partner with Milwaukee-based TMB Development, which in partnership with Max Dermond of Milwaukee, is redeveloping the brewery’s former boiler house. The $4.4 million project will create 45,000 sq ft of office space.

“If you want to be eligible for historic tax credits, there’s no sand-blasting allowed on the exterior,” Trainer says.

Using water and a chemical compound approved by the National Park Service, the entity within the Department of the Interior that clears such projects, TMB and Dermond had expected to give the building the normal three or so passes with the spray to get it clean.

“We had to wash it seven, eight and in some parts nine times,” Trainer says. One theory suggests that some of the brewery buildings were coated with a dark ash substance more than a century ago to make them look historic when they were new.

The boiler house windows and doors were another problem, Trainer says. Negotiating with the Wisconsin Historical Society and the National Park Service to come up with acceptable, cost- and energy-efficient windows and doors, and then getting appropriate bids on fabrication, took six to eight months.

Loft Element Under Way

Nearby, on West Winnebago Street, Oregon, Wis.-based Gorman & Co. is turning the brewery’s 150,000-sq-ft, cream-city-brick keg house into Blue Ribbon Lofts, featuring 95 affordable apartment units with underground parking. The units range in size from 750 sq ft to 2,000 sq ft. Some are loft spaces, and others are traditional apartments. First occupancy is slated for early 2009, with completion in April.

Scott Henricks, director of construction and design for Gorman, says the $9.5 million project has faced historical challenges similar to those encountered on the boiler house.

In addition, Gorman added a story to the interior of the building without altering the historic exterior. Henricks says that reducing floor-to-ceiling heights in the building and making creative use of the windows made the additional floor work out nicely.

“The windows on this building are just massive,” he says. By placing windows higher in some units and lower in others, with some windows bisected by floor plates, the building creates living spaces with a tremendous amount of daylight.

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