The veterans health care system is an attic of the nation’s good intentions, cluttered with Victorian surgeons quarters and tuberculosis wards, World War I shell shock asylums, New Deal libraries, Cold War bowling alleys and even a monkey house built to keep disillusioned Union veterans entertained.

For many buildings, there is no easy makeover, and few obvious buyers. Paying for upkeep is hard to justify at a time of soaring patient demand. So is paying for demolition. So hundreds of buildings stand preserved, at least for now, in a bureaucratic amber of indecision.

“We believe in honoring the V.A.’s history, but the best way to do that is to provide the best care today,” said Gary Kunich, a spokesman for the Milwaukee Veterans Affairs medical center. He was giving a tour of a new, state-of-the-art spinal injury clinic built near Old Main that cost $27 million. Renovating the old soldiers home would have cost nearly twice that, he said, adding, that knocking it down would also cost millions. “We’d rather spend the money here.”

Old Main was a model of modernity when it was authorized in 1865 by one of the last official acts of President Abraham Lincoln. It became home to about 1,000 former soldiers who rose at reveille each morning and dressed in blue uniforms, then filed into companies organized by disability. One visitor at the time praised the wards as “large and cheerful: well ventilated and well lighted.”

As the building aged into obsolescence, though, it stubbornly resisted solutions. A proposed lease to the City of Milwaukee for offices and apartments, fell apart a decade ago amid protests from local veterans groups.

As Old Main and the theater next-door deteriorated, the department considered calling in the bulldozers. But that plan stopped in 2011 when local preservationists got Old Main protected as a national historic landmark.

Then, in recent years, preservationists working with local veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs, worked out a 75-year lease that will allow a developer who specializes in historic preservation, the Alexander Company, to renovate Old Main and five other historic buildings on the campus as apartments for homeless veterans.