Milwaukee's 1916 Coast Guard Station Demolished
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Apr. 7, 2008
After decades of discussion about the fate of U.S. Coast Guard Station on Milwaukee's lakefront, demolition began on the 1916 Praire Style building last month.
Since the Coast Guard decommissioned the building in 1971, several proposals to turn the structure into a restaurant to a museum to an Indian cultural center have failed to make headway. A fire in 2005 damaged the already deteriorating structure, listed as both a local landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.
"It's a complex situation. I don't think there are any bad guys in the story," says Michael Stevens, Wisconsin's state historic preservation officer. "The building got to the point where it was so deteriorated that it got increasingly expensive to preserve. You have a lot of people who worked very hard to try to make it [preservation] happen, and it's a reminder of the importance of acting early on in the life cycle of a building."
Comments
Submitted by Jerry A. McCoy at: April 10, 2008
SHAME on Milwaukee!
Submitted by Dean at: April 10, 2008
The bad guys, if there were, would be the Milwaukee County for not doing any maintenance and restoration on the building for the course of over three decades. It's easy to wait until something become too derelict to fix and tear it down than to maintain it throughout the years. I don't think the County ever cared about what a gem the Coast Guard Station was.