I moved to Wauwatosa 15 years ago because it was already established. (Also because you get a lot more house and land for your money than in Whitefish Bay, but that’s another story.)
What you see is what you get, I thought.
And what I saw was good. Nice houses set among mature trees, green spaces, pockets of commerce. The Menomonee River and creeks that feed it. Fireflies everywhere come July. This year I saw the first one June 9, earlier than usual.
There are places here where you can walk—on sidewalks—from home to school, church, library, and grocery store. And you can stop for coffee on the way. That’s my definition of a great place to live. Near my house are excellent Chinese, Greek, and Indian restaurants. I don’t count the endless subway and burrito franchises.
But nothing’s settled. You drive down a parkway one day and there’s a woods. Next day, hundreds of cut trees like the bodies of beached whales.
Change. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s not. Often it’s hard to know which. Right now, though, life even here feels like walking on fishes.
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Walking is how I see Tosa. Maybe it’s because I’m nearsighted, but I like to see the world close up.
Most often I’m at the end of a leash. Wild dingo dog Idgy holds the other end: her focus is even more microscopic than mine. Bird bones buried in roadside leaves, raccoon scat lined up on the curb above the sewer grates. (Why do they do that?) Anyway, she’s all nose and bad taste.
So this blog will be about things seen and unseen, real and imagined, during everyday life in Wauwatosa. People and job-hunting, because they are always on my mind; buildings and plants, development and preservation; food, weather, politics, and schools; businesses and beauty; what is, what was, what might be. The spirit of things.
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I have lots of opinions, especially about what the places we live in should be like.
My late father, Bill Abts, was a designer and a bit of a visionary. In the 1940s, Third Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) was Milwaukee’s posh shopping district. Dad proposed that the business association buy houses on 2nd and 4th streets behind the members’ stores and turn them into parking and leisure areas. What a weird idea, they said. People aren’t going to drive to shop when they can take the streetcar!
(He also proposed turning alleys into one-way streets and tearing out the existing roads to create commons spaces between the facing bungalows and duplexes. So I come by my “crazy” ideas naturally.)
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Most days I walk Idgy along Underwood Parkway or on the County Grounds. I pick bouquets of rhubarb from the abandoned garden plots behind the red brick Eschweiler buildings. Pies, cakes, breads and muffins ensue. The world is good when there is rhubarb pie in it.
And that’s how I discovered the disappearance of the tennis courts and emergence of silt fence markers across from Hansen Golf Course.
Bottom line, in case you don’t know, is that a huge retention pond shaped like a reproducing amoeba will cover the old county nursery--one of the prettiest places in the county—behind the tennis court area. You may not have seen it because walking there has been perhaps a tad illegal. . .
Another lobe will fill the old gardens and wild aster fields across the street. A bridge will be built to span the narrows between the lobes so the traffic can continue along Swan Boulevard (in excess of 40 mph because they are all passing me, even when I’m driving).
I know this because the lovely and talented librarians at the Wauwatosa Public Library directed me to the MMSD (Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District) Milwaukee County Grounds Floodwater Management Facility and Underwood Creek Rehabilitation Project Plan.
Now, I like water as much as anyone. Water that fish swim in, and maybe people too. The Hoyt Park Pool. . . oops (but yahoo to the
Friends of Hoyt Park, who are rescuing it).
Or water with sandy shores or cattails and frogs.
That’s not the water that will be here. The ponds are about storm water, runoff and overflow.
Of course, they are also about keeping basements dry and, ultimately, cleaner drinking water. It’s all very complicated.
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As best I can figure, even though they are considered historic landmarks, the Eschweiler buildings, those remnants of handsome, uplifting, and durable architecture, appear to be doomed, too. I didn’t find a mention of that in skimming the report. But Figure 16 calls for planners to “Minimize Maintenance Requirements” in what appears to be that spot. And later there’s a plan for removing the building rubble after demolition.
Sounds like a done deal. And all it takes is waiting—maybe with a little bit of misdirection or ambivalent prose thrown in. The old tech high school building has been allowed to rot, probably beyond repair. Oops.
Of course there’s good news, too. The gardens have be
