Next time you have some time to spare as you drive along Lincoln Memorial Drive, stop near the Veterans Park Lagoon and walk eastward through the park toward Lake Michigan. Stop and admire what you see: the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava Wing, Discovery World, Harbor House, the Maier Festival Grounds, Milwaukee Community Sailing Center, McKinley Marina and Bradford Beach. You’ll also see a vast expanse of land crossed by bike paths and jogging trails, a beautiful lagoon, the cliffs of Lake Michigan and the city skyline. Milwaukee has inherited, preserved and invested in arguably the finest and most valuable shoreline of any city in the country.

Now imagine all that gone. Instead of that majestic scene, you are standing in the middle of a six-lane freeway running straight from Bradford Beach to the Hoan Bridge. Cars rush by, trucks belch diesel fumes and the noise is louder than you can yell. The parkland in which you are walking was paved over or never built; the city is cut off from Lake Michigan by the noise and pollution of cars and trucks.

Ridiculous, you say? Well, that freeway was actively supported by the “establishment” until the late 1970s and was part of the official “Regional Plan” until 1981. Its purpose was to relieve the congestion caused by the post-World War II explosion of car ownership and the exodus to the suburbs. This is the story of how that plan was stopped, which allowed for development of the lakefront as we know it today. It is a story of bi-partisan agreement (remember those?) on how to save the essence of the city.

By the 1960s and ’70s, key portions of Milwaukee’s freeway system were in place, consisting of a basic sideways “T”—Interstate 94 from Chicago through Downtown and, as I-41, north to Green Bay and I-94 west to Madison. These connectors relieved long-distance car and truck traffic, which previously had to navigate streets and two-lane roads. But there also was the aforementioned regional plan, which met with great resistance in Milwaukee, calling for additional freeways through many parts of the city.

The plan included a freeway around Milwaukee and another along the entire lakefront, connecting through a huge gash in the bluff to Ogden Avenue and Nash Street and across town to meet the north-south freeway (now I-43). Under the plan, this circumferential route would have been connected to the Hoan Bridge to carry traffic down the lakefront from Juneau Park to Racine, Kenosha and on to Chicago, forming a second freeway parallel to I-94, five miles to the east.

Friends of the Shepherd Help support Milwaukee's locally owned free weekly newspaper. LEARN MORE

Divide and Conquer

By around 1970, as the regional plan became known to the general public, awareness rose about the intended ripping up of key sections of the city, including the demolition of thousands of homes. Vocal opposition grew. A court injunction was obtained to protect the lakefront, but no such protection was afforded in several other parts of town. The transportation planners fought back, obtaining a State Supreme Court ruling rendering the injunction temporary, pending further study, including an environmental impact study.

Meanwhile, the highway agencies built small sections of freeway as soon as they had approval, hoping that, as each piece was completed, it would be harder to oppose the remaining portions. As the projects proceeded, those in favor were described as modern forward thinkers and everyone else as opposed to progress, economic development, jobs and even safety and environmental quality. This policy of divide and conquer left unfinished segments, called “stub ends,” all over town.

These stubs were a blight for years, emblematic of a city that could not make up its mind whether the lakefront was a treasure or a transportation corridor. One of these 30-foot-high monstrosities was captured on film in the 1980 John Belushi movie The Blues Brothers. The dangling stub of the unfinished, elevated I-794 was a perfect stage for a chase scene, with cars careering over the edge and falling cinematically to the ground below. Not captured on film, of course, was the removal of the Italian community from the Third Ward, whose houses and beautiful Our Lady of Pompeii Church were demolished and replaced by concrete bridges.

Challenging the Logic

Pockets of opposition emerged around town, but they were little match for the combined forces of business and labor in favor of the plan. While opposition groups formed around the segments of the plan that directly affected them—Stadium South, Lakefront, Park-West—they were too disparate and uncoordinated to surmount the establishment pro-freeway forces. As approvals were issued, home demolition and concrete paving proceeded, and the people who were once natural opponents to the construction were swept away. And as each piece was built, the cost of completing what remained decreased. Remaining opposition fragmented while road builders, materials suppliers, labor unions, business leaders and other supporters of finishing the job demanded that the plan go forward as quickly as possible.

But at the same time, a small coalition of state legislators and UW-Milwaukee professors decided to take a more coordinated, analysis-driven approach. They formed a study group to challenge the economic logic and engineering of the plan. The group included state office-holders and academics who brought political, economic and engineering expertise to a process that had been driven by business and labor leaders and professional transportation planners.

Many members of this task force went on to prominent public careers, including Jim Moody (later a U.S. congressman representing Milwaukee’s East Side), John Norquist (who became the city’s mayor) and Dave Schultz (subsequently Milwaukee county executive). It also included Mordecai Lee, who’s currently a professor of urban planning at UWM, as well as UWM professors Ed Beimborn and Bob Schmitt (engineering and geography, respectively).

The task force found that those freeway stub-ends were expensive physical symbols of the impasse with freeway proponents who would not consider modifications to their plan. Freeway proponents argued that transportation experts had developed the plan, that all the pieces of the plan fit together, and that each piece was essential to systematic traffic movement in a growing metropolis. The notion that the entire plan must be implemented, without changing any piece of it, became the first challenge for the task force.

The Pink Report

The task force prepared a study with an unglamorous name: “A Report Prepared by The Ad Hoc Legislative Task Force on Milwaukee Transportation.” It came to be known as “The Pink Report” because, when the time came to publish it, Dave Schultz volunteered to make copies, and the only cover stock he could find that weekend was pink. Written over a period of six months, the authors described their role as “blending political reality with technical competence to pinpoint the problem and to select a series of concrete steps for action.” The report was only 49 typewritten pages, but was packed with economic analyses, technical critiques and specific recommendations. The task force challenged many of the assumptions used to justify the plan and showed that the individual pieces of the freeway could, indeed, be changed without undermining the entire system.

The technical sections of The Pink Report outlined a number of planning errors, starting with the assumption that freeways merely serve existing land-use patterns. This is a key falsehood: Freeways also change traffic patterns and shift the tax base away from cities to suburbs, adding to miles driven and, ultimately, to congestion; the more we build, the busier they get.

Other less obvious, but no less important, errors included the planners’ assumptions of cheap gasoline and projections of development made possible by freeways that ignored lost development opportunities on land where the freeways were planned. Finally, travel time was the key savings from the plan, but not all time is of equal value. In particular, people place a much higher dollar value per hour saved when the savings come in minutes rather than in small, almost imperceptible chunks of a few seconds. Most of the savings claimed by the plan were in five-to-20-second intervals, and, therefore, their value had been exaggerated.

Dangling Stubs

The Pink Report provided a long list of recommendations for an improved planning process. Compared to the somewhat abstruse economic sections, the section that grabbed the most attention was the most practical: what to do with those dangling stubs! Fortunately, for the wide acceptability of its report, the task force included transportation engineers-professors Beimborn and Schmitt, experts in highway design. They wrote the chapter that laid out a specific list of recommendations, including maps, for tying all those “stub-ends” into local roads in a way that improved traffic flow without building the remaining parts of the plan.

Even the gigantic I-794 stub featured in The Blues Brothers was eventually connected to city streets and for 30 years was an integral part of the surface street system—before being restructured recently to make room for the high-rise Couture residential-commercial building. Beimborn and Schmitt showed that those dangling stubs had great potential for traffic flow if only they could be connected properly. Accordingly, I-794 was finally linked to the “Bridge to Nowhere” (the Hoan Bridge), which at the time was a laughing stock, built as part of the original regional plan, but not connected to anything. The “stub end treatments,” as they were known, provided the visual imagery for a feasible alternative to that regional plan.

The Pink Report was released in early 1977. By providing a thoughtful explanation of what was wrong with the regional plan, and by providing alternatives, the “freeway opponents” were suddenly seen as advocates of a solution rather than grumblers. This newfound respectability changed the tenor of subsequent discussions with newspaper editors, business leaders, planners and state officials. In early 1978, Gov. Martin Schreiber formally “de-listed” a segment—the “Stadium South.” For the first time, there was a formal acknowledgement that the plan would not be completed in its entirety. Land acquisition and work on all other segments stopped, and local transportation planners for the City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County and the state began considering suggestions for integrating the stub-ends into the existing street network.

Bi-Partisan Action

Of course, the state legislature had to act on a parallel track. As opposition to the plan developed greater cohesion and engineering and economic competence, key members of the legislature used it to change the debate in Madison. It was particularly advantageous that two key members of the Ad Hoc Legislative Committee were positioned to move legislation to de-map the plan: state Rep. Michael Elconin and state Sen. Jim Moody used The Pink Report as evidence of the need to change the plan. By then, two additional members of the Ad Hoc Committee, John Norquist and Mordecai Lee, were members of the state Assembly from the Milwaukee area as well.

By providing a viable alternative, The Pink Report gave legislators a chance to save money, get traffic flowing, end the blight of useless concrete dangling in the air and stop the destruction of thousands of additional homes in the city. With the logjam broken, the legislation worked its way up to a bi-partisan conclusion: In 1981, Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Lee Dreyfus signed the bill that ended the threat to the Milwaukee Lakefront.

Epilogue: Keep Admiring Our Great Lakefront

Today, it is remarkable to read the list of specific “stub-end-treatments” recommended in The Pink Report. All were eventually finished, many using almost exactly the same map as in the report, attesting in a very concrete way to its effect on the community. Its effects along Milwaukee’s Lake Michigan shoreline are perhaps the most notable.

As you complete your walk along the lakefront, look at all the people. You will find all ages, ethnicities and countries of origin. They are jogging, roller-skating and in wheelchairs. There are couples, families, singles, the young and the elderly—a diversity befitting Milwaukee, a city whose name means “gathering of waters.” The parkland saved from freeway construction has become a place where people gather daily by the water to enjoy its space and its peacefulness to think, and to explore the wonders of a great lake. But the story does not end there.

In 2017, the construction cranes are building the new headquarters for Northwestern Mutual, Johnson Controls and the Couture high-rise—all three rising above the area saved by the Ad Hoc Legislative Task Force and the ideas contained within its Pink Report—the 49 pages of which laid the economic foundation for an ongoing investment in the city’s future.

Michael Elconin served in the Wisconsin State Assembly and is currently a businessman in San Diego. William Holahan is Emeritus Professor of Economics at UW-Milwaukee. In 1976, they founded and managed the task force whose report led to bipartisan consensus to de-map the planned freeway along the lake, enabling the development of the Milwaukee Lakefront into one of the great urban spaces in the nation.