John Gurda

Special to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

You could see it coming from a mile away. To the north, the Third Ward had emerged from a long period of torpor to become one of hottest destinations in the state for nightlife, shopping and luxury living. The Third Ward’s wave of transforming energy was so powerful that it jumped the Milwaukee River and turned Walker’s Point, the city’s oldest neighborhood, into another showcase for 21st-century development.

To the south, Bay View, which began as a company town built around a long-gone iron mill, was experiencing a transformation of its own. Sleepy Kinnickinnic Ave. had awakened to become one of the city’s busiest restaurant rows, and homes built for mill workers were attracting scores of millennials.

Between these two poles — the resurrected Third Ward and the reinvented Bay View —lay a burned-out, post-industrial landscape that only a graffiti artist could have loved. Shuttered factories, scruffy nightspots, and weed-choked vacant lots marked both sides of Milwaukee’s inner harbor.

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It was only a matter of time before the developers arrived. The ripples of energy spreading outward from the neighborhoods both north and south began to converge not even a decade ago, creating a new hot spot known as the Harbor District. It covers a thousand acres of waterfront east of S. First St. between Walker’s Point and Bay View, including Jones Island. Projects underway and on the way will change its landscape so radically that, in another decade or two, older Milwaukeeans won’t recognize the place.

As its future begins to take shape, the Harbor District can look back to an unusually rich past. When the first public land sale was held in 1835, the district’s defining feature was its wetness. With the exception of a narrow fringe on its western margin and the sandbar that became Jones Island, every square inch of today’s Harbor District was under water. The Kinnickinnic River, invariably marked as a “creek” on early maps, wound through a morass of wild rice, cattails, sedges, and reeds on its way to join the Milwaukee River at the point where it entered Lake Michigan.

This waterlogged condition was temporary. Until the first railroads were built in the 1850s, everyone came to Milwaukee by boat, and the river mouth was quite literally the city’s front door. As competition for prime spots on the harbor intensified, landfill activity was continuous. Some of the first developments were practically amphibious. In about 1854, Capt. James Monroe Jones opened a shipyard on the sandy peninsula (never a true island) that still bears his name. In 1868 Wolf & Davidson built an even larger yard on the west side of the Kinnickinnic marsh.

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Other businesses needed drier land. Milwaukee became the state’s commercial center largely on the strength of its water and rail connections, and the Harbor District became a center for both. Tons of gravel “borrowed” from the high ground and vast quantities of muck dredged from the river beds erased the district’s marshes, and in their place emerged a major rail corridor and a bustling harbor. Dockside grain elevators shared the waterfront with lumberyards, flour mills, malthouses, and, by the late 1800s, piles of coal and salt.

Just inland, within easy reach of both rail and water transport, local entrepreneurs launched industries that helped make Milwaukee the “Machine Shop of the World.” Their products ranged from church bells to ship propellers, but four enterprises stood out from the rest. In 1867 Edward P. Allis opened his Reliance Works on the southeast corner of S. First and W. Florida streets, specializing in steam engines. Within 20 years, Allis’s plant employed more than 1,000 men and stretched four blocks to the south. In 1902 the company, still growing, relocated a few miles west under a new name: Allis-Chalmers.

A massive coke plant opened on the waterfront south of the Allis works in 1903. Its 160 tall, narrow ovens heated coal in the absence of oxygen, producing gas that was sold to lighting and heating customers and coke, a solid fuel that went to the region’s foundries and blast furnaces. Known as Solvay Coke for most of its career, the plant was among the city’s most prodigious polluters at a time when clean air was in critically short supply.

Farther down the inner harbor, at what is now the south end of the Daniel Hoan Bridge, lay a sprawling iron mill established in 1868. The Milwaukee Iron Company produced railroad rails at first, but its successor, Illinois Steel, became a major supplier of “merchant iron” in standard shapes and sizes. By 1885 the Bay View rolling mill had a payroll of 1,500, making it one of the Milwaukee area’s largest employers.

The Harbor District’s fourth major enterprise was public in nature. In 1925 the city opened a sewage treatment plant at the northern tip of the Jones Island peninsula, squarely on the site of an old Polish fishing village. The new plant, the largest of its kind in the world, enabled Milwaukee to remove 95 percent of the bacteria and 90 percent of the solids from its sewage—a welcome change after decades of dead rivers and toxic tap water.

The Reliance Works, Solvay Coke, Illinois Steel, and the Jones Island sewage plant were the four largest enterprises ringing the inner harbor, but there were dozens of others, and their cumulative impact was staggering. As important as it was economically, the future Harbor District was an aesthetic and environmental disaster. Green space was nonexistent, there was no public access of any kind, and both the water and the air were among the region’s dirtiest. Anyone foolish enough to launch a canoe in the inner harbor would have risked his or her health as well as safety.

The waterfront lost energy as the 20th century progressed. The sewage plant continued to puff away, but the Reliance Works closed in 1923 and Illinois Steel followed in 1929. The coke plant hung on until 1983, but by that time the district’s heyday was long past. Dozens of employers, both large and small, had moved to newer quarters in more distant locales or closed altogether, leaving behind a landscape that could have been the set for a post-apocalyptic movie.

It was not until the early 2000s that there were signs of interest in the district, most of it encouraged, no doubt, by the renaissance underway in the Third Ward, Bay View, and the nearby Menomonee Valley. In 2013 the city of Milwaukee made the inner harbor part of a master plan that promised “a holistic, place-based approach to revitalizing a working waterfront and surrounding neighborhoods.” One year later, Harbor District, Inc. was launched as a public-private partnership to develop a detailed plan and carry it to completion.

Progress since then has been so rapid than even the optimists are surprised. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences has transformed an old tile factory at the east end of Greenfield Ave. Michels Inc., a Wisconsin utility contractor, is hard at work on a mixed-use development at a bend of the Kinnickinnic River west of S. First St. Komatsu, the successor to the Harnischfeger line of mining equipment, is moving to the Solvay Coke site — lock, stock, and turret lathes. These projects will boost the inner harbor’s economy, while others — a gateway park, an expanded Riverwalk, a restored wetland, kayak and canoe launches — will ensure permanent public access to the waterfront.

Milwaukee came to life on the inner harbor. For decades it was the city’s front door, but over time it became an urban afterthought, forgotten by all but those who worked there. Today, as the Harbor District’s redevelopment continues, that historic front door is opening again for all of us.

John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, writes for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of each month (www.johngurda.com). Get our newsletter: Field Notes comes to your inbox each Tuesday morning.