Historic Commission Allows for Eschweiler Demos if School Falters

The Wauwatosa Historic Preservation Commission voted Monday for a plan that allows for a developer and a charter school to work together on preserving all of the historic Eschweiler Buildings – but also would permit demolishing three of the four buildings if the school plan fails to achieve its financing goals.

Mandel Group, which would build new residential units surrounding the Eschweilers, and the Forest Exploration Center University School put together a plan that essentially gives the buildings to the school.

But it's up to the school to find funding commitments to begin refurbishing and occupying the buildings within a timeline of about 20 months.

If the charter school succeeds, it will gain a long-term lease "for a consideration" – $1 a year – and the Eschweiler Buildings will not only remain standing but get the long-awaited restoration they have needed.

If the school does not take hold of the imaginations of enough donors and investors, however, no further efforts would likely be considered for saving any but the largest of the Eschweilers, the Administration Building, intact.

At that point, plans would revert to an earlier proposal by Mandel to partially demolish the three smaller buildings of the campus and turn them into walled gardens. The gardens would "memorialize" the buildings, preserve the outline of the campus' historic quadrangle layout, and would be open to the public, Mandel has said.

Read Wauwatosa Patch's coverage of the long-running Eschweiler Campus preservation debate.

Preservationists fought that since Mandel Group proposed it a year ago this month. The Forest Exploration School idea surfaced late last fall and has been subject to negotiations between the school's board, Mandel Group and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Real Estate Foundation, leading to a formal presentation to the Historic Preservation Commission last month.

John Gee, executive director of the Forest Exploration Center, said then that he was confident in his group's fundraising plans and that it was his firm intention to open classes for at least two grade levels in the Eschweilers in the fall of 2014.

He said that fundraising had begun just two weeks before that and had already pulled in $75,000.

"That," he said, "is a tiny amount of money" compared to what the school needs to open in its first phase, but he said he believed that it was a good sign, that initial donors were willing to step forward so soon.

The school plan needs to raise about $2 million through donations and $6 million through other funding sources – or to have substantial commitments toward those figures – to trigger its establishment and a long-term lease.