Murphy's Law

The story was told to me years ago by a close observer of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, the elite group of business leaders. Back then, the GMC wielded considerable power and was often consulted to approve of civic projects. The project in question was O’Donnell Park, a new structure that would be built at the end of Wisconsin Avenue.

It was 1987, and Milwaukee County Executive William O’Donnell had set the goal of creating some way of linking Wisconsin Avenue with the lake. The area just below the east end of Wisconsin Avenue had long been an eyesore and at the time was just a parking lot – this, on perhaps the prime piece of real estate in the state. For decades, there had been periodic discussion about how to knit Downtown to the lakefront. O’Donnell’s idea was to create a park that would roll down from Wisconsin Avenue, with a parking deck below, whose revenue would help pay for the whole thing.

It didn’t quite work that way. The structure created by architect Jordan Miller was anything but park-like. And when Miller, famed for his salesmanship, presented the design mockups to members of the GMC, it looked like you could see the lake from Wisconsin Avenue. In fact, this was quite misleading, and Miller snookered the group. When built, the parking complex was so high, it completely obliterated the old view of the lake from Wisconsin Avenue. It offered no bridge or connection to the waterfront below, and when viewed from the lake, looked like ”Fort O’Donnell,” as Milwaukee Magazine would dub it.

Worse, the building had massive structural problems: faulty beams and column joints, and pilings that were all too weak to support the structure. As I noted in an earlier column, it required a $1 million fix and some 10 train cars of lava rock shipped from Colorado to fix the problem. But a weak structure like that is difficult to permanently repair. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported, a 2005 inspection of O’Donnell Park found cracks in the ceiling slabs, beams, walls and floors throughout the structure. Add the fact that 70 exterior concrete panels may have been attached to the building in a dangerous and slipshod way, and you have some massive problems to fix on a building now more than 20 years old.

Does it make sense to spend all the money it will take to fix a building whose superstructure was, from the beginning, disastrously compromised? Not to mention that it closes off Downtown from the lakefront. The only connection is architect Santiago Calatrava’s ingeniously designed footbridge that connects O’Donnell Park to the Milwaukee Art Museum, but its suspended cable construction would continue to stand even if the parking structure was torn down.

This is an opportunity for city and county planners to revisit the issue of knitting Downtown to the lake with a design solution that actually works, rather than trying to prop up crumbling Fort O’Donnell. Just north of this is Juneau Park, which is also disconnected from the lakefront, as this magazine’s architecture critic Tom Bamberger has argued.

Rather than the current Juneau Park, a pass-through corridor with a line of trees blocking the view of the lake, Bamberger asks us

O’Donnell Park is a classic example of the worst of the old Milwaukee way of thinking, and it has literally fallen apart before our eyes. That’s a tragedy, but also a golden opportunity – to remake and revive perhaps the most important site in town.

Medical College’s Financial Challenge

John Raymond is the new top doc in town, the recently appointed president of the Medical College of Wisconsin, but the Journal Sentinel coverage of him has been pretty skimpy. The Business Journal, though, offers a longish interview with some interesting nuggets of information. Raymond admits the central financial problem of the college, that it “depends very heavily on generating a clinical margin” – meaning a markup on medical bills of those patients served by MCW-affiliated doctors.

Because it’s a private institution, about 1 percent of the college's budget comes from state funding (mostly indirect funding for student scholarships and the like), compared to 11 percent of the University of Wisconsin Medical School’s budget. MCW also ranks below many peers in the size of its endowment. As a result, it is far more dependent on revenue grabbed from patient medical bills than most medical colleges. And that, of course, helps drive the relatively high cost of medical care in this metro area.

Raymond’s predecessor, T. Michael Bolger, did an amazing job of helping grow MCW from a small, poorly funded college to what has now become a very important institution and the main source of federal research dollars for Milwaukee. But as Raymond admitted to the Business Journal, a school so dependent on clinical revenue is quite vulnerable – “really subject to the risks of the [health care] marketplace.”

Raymond’s most important challenge – and quite possibly how the success of his tenure will be measured –will be finding ways to build the endowment, or increase state funding, or both.

The Buzz

-Was Waukesha Mayor Larry Nelson too overconfident in his race against challenger Jeff Scrima? Campaign reports show Nelson didn’t spend $6,400 of the $26,000 in campaign funds he raised. That may have been a fatal error.

-Back on May 25, I wrote a column suggesting U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold could be in trouble in his re-election bid, which liberal commentators scoffed at. The Sunday JS story suggesting he could be vulnerable is the latest of numerous national stories in the last couple weeks that make the same point.

-The latest JS reporter to leave, national reporter Diana Marrero, brings an end to the paper’s Sunday roundup of news about Wisconsin’s congressional delegations. Will the paper replace her or further reduce its dwindling national coverage?

-Milwaukee’s MacArthur “genius” grant-winner Will Allen continues to win acclaim for his innovative approaches to urban farming. His latest plaudit, the Harmony with Hope Award, will be given by the California-based Elfenworks Foundation, which honors the nation’s top “change makers.”

-And the Sports Nut tells a sweet tale about Bob Uecker and The Kid.