Community Corner
Eschweiler Rehab Work Gets Under Way
Volunteers and professional contractors are beginning to bring the Eschweiler Campus Administration Building back to its former appearance.
The crew is small so far, the goals right now are modest, but work has begun to make the historic Eschweiler Buildings on the County Grounds presentable again as what they were built to be – a school.
Plans to preserve and restore four of the five buildings on the campus as home to a new science-based charter school for the Forest Exploration Center are moving ahead, even though the charter itself has not yet been granted and there is much money to be raised.
Brush has been cleared around all the buildings, both to improve their appearance and to eliminate hiding places for vandals. That work has been almost all-volunteer.
Interior work is being done now on only the largest of the Alexander Eschweiler-designed structures, the Administration Building. The charter school would move in there in the fall of 2014, serving grades six through eight.
That's if the FEC can make enough progress rehabilitating the buildings and raise enough funds to pay for its operation and further restoration.
As if to celebrate the occasion, three monarchs and a black swallowtail butterfly flitted over the campus quadrangle, and a dickcissel, a grassland bird that has become rare in Wisconsin, landed and perched on a wildflower just in front of the Administration Building before diving into the grass for a bug or seed.
Tom Chapman, president of the FEC board of directors, said the buildings were created, as the Milwaukee County School of Agriculture and Domestic Economy, to foster an understanding of the place of an urban population in relationship to the land and its resources, and we've circled back to that place now.
Of the school, he said, "It's the right idea at the right time."
Volunteers take on cleanup duties
Chapman was also the volunteer crew leader Saturday morning, and he plans to devote time every other weekend to spruce up the Administration Building."The goal at this point is clean it up, fix a few things, and make it so when we tour people through here, especially potential funders, they are seeing the beauty of it and the potential of it," Chapman said.
That means tackling decades of accumulated dirt, dust, broken glass and graffiti, plus some fallen plaster. The latter doesn't bother Chapman at all – in fact, he's a little bit glad to have some of the building's structural walls exposed.
"That's just plaster," he said. "But it shows you how these buildings were made. The architects and engineers we've had in to look at it have all said they are very structurally sound, rock solid. They were built to last."
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The stairways are among the best visible examples of the quality of design and workmanship, as well as functionality, that went into the Eschweilers.
The newel posts are made of iron, as are the stair risers. The joining of the hardwood handrails is nearly invisible, seamless after 100 years. The stair treads are made of solid slate and show so little wear they might have been laid yesterday. Tiled landings show not a crack (and nor do tiled floors in the basement).
Anyone knowledgable about structural engineering would note that this building has not moved one millimeter, or if it did, it moved like one solid piece.
Lots of windows; lots of work
But that's not to say everything is grand. The Administration Building is not in move-in condition."The most expensive thing to fix is going to be the windows," Chapman said. "They are by far the worst."
At the same time, the windows are among the best features of the building, Chapman said.
"When they were built, there was a lot of concern for energy costs – electric lighting was still very new, and expensive. So there are a lot of windows and a lot of natural light."
That concept has come strongly back into vogue, but a century of exposure to the elements, and to vandals, has left the Eschweilers' windows in bad shape. They've been boarded up for years, but not very tightly, and moisture has continued to make itself known.
Roof leaks have buckled boards in some of the wooden floors, but not extensively.
Professional contractors have also been at work, with the first focus on security. A high-tech motion sensor system has been installed, because intruders enter through steam tunnels connecting all the buildings on the campus, not through doors and windows.
Three officers of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee police force stopped in Saturday to take a daylight look at the layout of the buildings – they'd only seen them before by the light of flashlights, chasing prowlers.
They were impressed by the features of the building they'd never seen in their nighttime forays – particularly the vaulted third-floor gymnasium.
A professional contractor also did a little refinishing, stripping and sanding out a portion of a Gymnasium wall and two stairway handrails, just to show how good their condition is. He told Chapman that the layers of painted grafitti he removed from the Gym wall had served an unintended good.
"He told me it actually helped seal the wood and preserved it," Chapman said.
A room with a view
FEC board member Peggy Rosenzweig also stopped by to see what progress Chapman and his crew were making and was thrilled with how much cleaner the buildings had become since her last visit.Rosenzweig loves the buildings, all of them, and the Administration Building the more so, and the Gymnasium more yet, but she led the way to the old boys' lavatory off the Gymnasium to show her favorite thing of all.
There, two smaller windows were left unboarded, one on the north and one on the east.
To the north one looks across the deep green of the Menomonee River Valley to the spire of Mount Mary College, a mile and a half away but seeming so close in the crystalline sunshine you think you could reach out and touch them.
To the east, across parkland and open spaces, the skyline of downtown Milwaukee glistens on the horizon seven miles away.
"Isn't it something," Rosenzweig says. "Is there such a view anywhere? It's just splendid."
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