August 2006

Grandeur of Kilbourn bridge to be restored

When the designs for the Kilbourn Avenue bridge showed up at Milwaukee’s Department of Public works in the mid-1920s, city staff sent them back.

It wanted something grander, said Craig Liberto, Milwaukee Department of Public Works structural design manager.  After all, Kilbourn Avenue was named after one of the city’s founding fathers, and the boulevard was a mainline leading to City Hall, which was the city’s tallest building at the time.

Modern Milwaukeeans should recognize the design that finally came back: a bascule lift bridge heavily ornamented with cut stone and framed by four operator houses.

“That means the city put a lot of money into that when it first built it; it’s designed as a gateway bridge,” said Mead & Hunt Historic Preservation Specialist Bob Frame, who is working on the bridge’s restoration.

The state Department of Transportation, in conjunction with the city, is bidding out a contract to restore the 1929 bridge and preserve it for future generations.  The historic Kilbourn Avenue bridge, a pioneer of the Milwaukee-style bascule, will look about the same after its renovation is complete in October 2008 as it does now.

That’s the whole point, considering it doesn’t look too different today than it did when it first opened.  Perhaps the most obvious difference between its newborn and 77-year-old incarnations is that the bridge’s roadway is now a metal grate, instead of the rubber blocks that originally paved its surface.

Page from the past
With all the changes since its opening, some of the features to be preserved are anachronisms.  The bridge has operator houses on both ends because originally two peopled opened it – one for each leaf, Frame said.  The project will also preserve the iridescent signaling balls atop the houses, which would raise or lower to tell boaters if the bridge was open, he added.  The city will hire a firm to fabricate them based on a leftover signal ball that DPW staff recently found while moving from its facility in the Menomonee Valley to make way for the Harley Davidson museum, Liberto said.

With today’s remote controls, radios and video cameras, the dual operators and signaling balls aren’t necessary.  The bridges also don’t open as much as they used to when the Milwaukee River was a commercial thoroughfare and the city Fire Department used boats, Frame said.

“If you are looking from a historic point of view, it means a lot more to the public if they can see it operate,” Frame said.  “You always want to see it work the way it was designed to.”

The bridge’s restoration is the result of a January 1997 statewide agreement involving WisDOT and the Federal Highway Administration to preserve Wisconsin’s historic movable bridges, Liberto said.  It also involved Milwaukee’s State Street bridge, which Zenith Tech Inc. is restoring right now, and the Cherry Street bridge, which will be restored sometime in the future.

Liberto said the city got a sticker shock when the estimates for the Kilbourn bridge restoration came in and is going to have to explore ways to pay for the Cherry Street bridge project.

However, Bob Newbery, WisDOT staff historian, noted that people must consider the broader economic and cultural benefits of such restoration projects.

“How much value do you put on RiverSplash and how much of that goes back to the ambiance?” he said.  “It’s a question of trying to balance the long-term and short-term advantages.  What you are putting up is the value of the cultural resource.”

WisDOT will award the contract for the restoration project in September, and work should begin after the State Street bridge reopens in spring 2007.  The project is scheduled for completion in October 2008.

Reprinted from the August 8, 2006 issue of The Daily Reporter.