A Milwaukee freeway bites the dust; make way for boulevards

Gentlemen, start your jackhammers — the time for demolishing urban freeways is arriving. On the last week in June, crews began breaking up pavement on the Park East Freeway just north of downtown Milwaukee — one of a number of North American urban freeways that are likely to be razed as cities try to knit streets and neighborhoods back together. The elevated mile-long spur of Park East Freeway will be removed by spring or early summer of 2003. In its place will be a grade-level six-lane boulevard — and opportunities for creating as much as $250 million of housing, offices, shops, and entertainment venues on 26 acres that had been unavailable or unattractive as long as the freeway existed. Removal of the spur — part of a never completed loop of freeways around downtown Milwaukee — has been proposed since at least 1991. “You put good ideas out there long enough and they begin to take,” says Peter Park, the city’s director of planning. One factor that propelled the demolition plan forward was the desire of the Harley-Davidson Corporation to establish a motorcycle museum, The Harley-Davidson Experience, in a former brewery near the road. “They said the freeway has got to come down,” Park says. The Park East spur carried 22,000 cars a day. “The grid,” predicts Mayor John O. Norquist, “will handle that traffic better.” The freeway could have lasted another 13 to 15 years, but then it would have needed to be rebuilt — at great expense. Demolishing it and constructing the boulevard and a new bridge over the Milwaukee River will cost $25 million, all but $3.7 million of it paid for with federal transportation funds. Razing of freeways has been uncommon in North American cities, but where it’s occurred, the results have been encouraging. After the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Embarcadero Freeway in 1989, San Francisco decided not to rebuild it. Instead, a boulevard with streetcars from all over the world running down its center and with space for cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians as well, was installed. People love it. Not only did much-feared results, such as traffic congestion and a fall-off in business for Chinatown, fail to materialize; real estate values in areas near the Embarcadero rose a reported 300 percent. Now San Francisco is grappling with whether to remove another earthquake-damaged artery, the Central Freeway. San Francisco architect Daniel Solomon, in characteristically sardonic fashion, told a gathering during CNU X in Miami Beach that getting rid of a freeway is nearly impossible under most circumstances — “you need either an act of nature or a John Norquist.” Well, not quite. Limited-access roads have been biting the dust in a few intelligently governed cities since the 1970s. One of the first to go was Harbor Drive, a six-lane road that separated downtown Portland, Oregon, from the Willamette River. Toronto took down an elevated one-mile section of the Gardiner Expressway, located east of the central business district and carrying 40,000 vehicles/day, in 2000. Crews dismantled the unloved road as quietly as possible, to avoid disturbing nearby recording studios. By the end of 2001, commuters were traveling a reworked Lake Shore Boulevard — the road that once ran directly beneath that section of the Gardiner. The same miracle that occurred in San Francisco came to pass in Toronto: the anticipated traffic tie-ups never developed. “It’s been a transportation success and a planning and urban design success,” says Linda MacDonald, manager of Central Waterfront Community Planning. The reconfigured Lake Shore Boulevard has two-lane exit roads, which carry traffic toward downtown much more smoothly than did the Gardiner’s single-lane exit ramps. Adorned with a planted median and complemented by wide landscaped sidewalks for pedestrians and cyclists on both sides, the boulevard is “part of the normal street system,” MacDonald notes. Buildings that had their backs or sides to the expressway will eventually develop attractive facades along the boulevard, planners expect. bigger teardown discussed Toronto is now debating whether to tear down the main section of the Gardiner that serves downtown. This is a three- mile-long elevated segment that carries 200,000 vehicles a day and forms a barrier between downtown and the waterfront. The estimated $3 billion (Canadian) cost of removing the freeway, fashioning an attractive boulevard and auxiliary roads, and introducing better public transit is causing some officials to entertain second thoughts. Apprehension about what will happen to the traffic is also sowing doubts. Nonetheless, Robert Freedman, Toronto’s director of urban design, thinks replacement of the Gardiner with a grade-level boulevard makes sense and ultimately will happen. “There’s this kind of magic that happens when expressways are taken down,” Freedman exults. “Some of the traffic just disappears. Nobody knows exactly where it goes.” u