Milwaukee: Mitchell Park

Kids flying kites in the open field adjacent the domes

Mitchell Park & Horticultural Conservatory

While we left Milwaukee a few months ago, I still daydream about long afternoons in hammocks in Milwaukee's Mitchell Park, just down the street from our house. This place is full of life and beauty, a real asset to the Silver City neighborhood.

The most iconic feature of the park are the Mitchell Domes - built in the heyday of Milwaukee's industrial prosperity. The 3-dome design won an architecture contest in 1969, replacing the previous boxy greenhouses. Each dome is home to a unique climate, supporting plants native to desert, tropical, and floral environments. These are particularly handy when Milwaukee freezes over and the residents retreat indoors. Visiting the domes in the winter was a quality respite from the indoor beer-drinking and complaining that I find so therapeutic while wondering why I live where the air hurts my face.

In the summer months, the park is home to barbecuing families, kids flying kites, and the authors of this blog sitting in a hammock. Trees that are bare in winter bloom in vibrant colors. The pinks, yellows and greens are a living relic of the original 1895 horticultural conservancy, preserved by the Milwaukee County Parks department. This painting on the landscape brings out the best in our community. Several birthdays a weekend take place on the picnic tables scattered throughout the park. Bouncy castles and balloons add to the whimsy of the trees, making a day in the park as much about people watching as unwinding in nature.

When Milwaukee's factories were shiny and new, Mitchell Park resembled a turn-of-the-century amusement park. The conservatory was founded on grounds that stretched into the neighborhoods to its south. It included a swimming pool, carousel, and a Harley Davidson sponsored track for bike and motorcycle races. I can't confirm that from internet searches, but saw an old map of the park at a museum a mile down the street. As the need for labor in Milwaukee expanded, the southern end was paved over and today houses our old neighbors in Leighton Boulevard West just east of Silver City. The remaining amenities tie the two neighborhoods together; with kids sharing a football field, basketball courts, a lake regularly stocked with fish, and wide open green spaces.

At night the park feels much different. In a heavily policed area, there is no better place to escape the fuzz than the shadows and underpasses in this wide open, sporadically lit space. The parking lot next to the domes usually had a cop in it, so you could safely sit on the benches overlooking the park at any hour. Sitting on the park's edge you can catch glimpses of shambolic figures passing in the night. This remnants of late night parties usually made it into the lake in the park's center. Milwaukee County's cleaning schedule of bi-yearly cleanings (from a wooden dinghy) left sun-bleached refuse in the weeds at the edge of the water for months at a time.

Maintenance of the park slows down in the winter, but quickly picks up once it gets warm. I righteously complained to Kateri for a year about this sad little bench. After it got nice out and still wasn't fixed, I filled out an online form and it was sit-able within the month. Lesson learned; complaining doesn't help unless you direct it to the right people! The parks department does great work with limited resources, and they're very responsive to feedback from people in the community.

Oh man do I love this park. First place I'm visiting next time I'm back in Milwaukee! If you're in the area, visit the domes and consider a donation. Two of the domes are getting a little crumbly - the desert and tropical areas are off-limits to avoid falling concrete. The floral dome is completely safe, but only through a short-term, low cost fix. There is not a good plan to invest in long term stability of this stupendous landmark - perhaps a federal infrastructure stimulus package would help? Seems like a better use of money than another tax cut tax cut that won't pay for itself...

Milwaukee: Three Bridges Park

Three Bridges Park has delightful spots near the Fox River to fall in love with.

Sitting by Fox River under 35th Street Viaduct a Description (read more here)

Nearby my ears seek

the rustle of leaves, collision of grass and chirp of insect.

A focus to divorce the sense from the knowledge

just beyond is a train, cars, building noises.

Immediacy - the illusion of control.

Our community garden at the start of growing.
Grain train can be seen behind me.

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Three Bridges Park

Three Bridges Park is my favorite! No visit to Milwaukee can illustrate so much of its history, good and bad, as this park.

The park provides immediate relief from an urban landscape. It is adjacent to an industrial park on one side and our neighbor, Silver City, on the other. As my favorite park, it is self-aware; Three Bridges uses the contrast of urban elements surrounding it to transform itself into an oasis and object of beauty.

Three Bridges Park in the Menomonee Valley has been my home in Milwaukee. It provides soil for me to grow, space for me to run, lessons for me to learn. I have done invasive species removal (the terrible garlic mustard beware), bee population surveys, bird walks, and kayak in this space.

The Valley has been a central part of urban Milwaukee history and its economics. Originally, it provided wild rice on the floodplain of the Menomonee River for Native American tribes. As manifest destiny moved towards that supposed destiny, industrialization took over, and the Valley became the source of jobs for the burgeoning city of Milwaukee. Industrialization displaced the native peoples, their community and way of life to usher in economic immigrants.

By the 1870s, leather tanning, meat packing, and machine tooling became the backbone of Milwaukee’s economy. Jobs in Milwaukee were strong during this time with a full third of the city's population working in the Valley. Today the Valley is coming back as an economic center, but many of the people working there live in surrounding suburbs. Unfortunately, this means the jobs available in the Valley do not help to employ the 4,500 of my neighbors who are actively seeking jobs.

In the 1950s the natural division that the Valley imposed on the city of Milwaukee was augmented by a highway. The highway not only disrupted local black economies through eminent domain land acquisition; it solidified the racial segregation, which is still among the worst in the country. The Valley and highway are traversed by a series of viaducts. During the 1960s these bridges were the nucleating center for integration efforts. If you want to read more about Milwaukee's Fair Housing Marches Crossing the Line has done a fabulous job in compiling a stunning array of primary documents and critical analysis.

The Urban Ecology Center mobilizes and engages 
the local community in events within the park.

The Valley took a lot of abuse from its relationship with factories - erosion of the river banks, heavy metals dumped into the soil, toxic detergents leached into the once fertile soil. Three Bridges Park follows the banks of the Fox River. The overall pollution of the Fox River got to a level that it and the surrounding land was declared a Brownfield Site (one step down from a Superfund Site). The ecological community collapsed and the human community, in our neighborhood, suffered health consequences from the environmental hazards.

Obviously, the city does not have a park that is a brownfield. So, what happened?

Phytoremediation! <Nerd Alert - I need to take a deep breath and not overexplain.>

An organization called the Urban Ecology Center has done a fabulous job in building up and maintaining this park. The Urban Ecology Center participated in a multiorganizational $26 million dollar project to transform 24 acres of wasteland into outdoor learning areas and increase the water quality of the Fox River while increasing pedestrian/bike access to the Valley.

Why so much? Well . . . the park was built on a former rail yard that was vacant for decades and cleaned up a brownfield site. It now features one mile of glorious hiking trails through restored prairie, access to the river for fishing and canoeing, community gardens  (like ours in the picture above) and new bike/pedestrian bridges providing access to the Mitchell Park Domes and the surrounding neighborhoods. Talk about transformation Tuesdays. 

1. The river banks were stabilized with retaining walls, and tree planting.
2. The original contaminated soil throughout the 24 acres was buried under half a mile of construction debris from a nearby highway project. This allowed the park to be sculpted into a watershed by adding intentional hills which control the flow of water through the park into the river.
3. Soil was physically secured to stop erosion. The park planted fast rooting grasses/shrubs.
4. The plants uptake contaminates slowly allowing for the toxic materials to be dispersed in negligible quantities into the environment. 
5. The restored prairie is jealously protected from invasive species by volunteer efforts (who likes weeding?)
6. The healthy plant life results in vibrant insect and small mammal communities - with the hope that larger organisms will be welcomed back into the area soon.

And if this all did not make you want to visit and fall in love with the park - its name will. The name was crowdsourced from 777 submissions from the local community. Three Bridges was chosen to represent the hope that this park would act as a connector for the different communities in Milwaukee. 

I challenge you to find a park in your community that represents where you live.