Milwaukee's Changing Lakefront

Milwaukee’s three rivers and surrounding wetlands first drew Native Americans, who used the water for game, waterfowl, fish, wild rice, and canoe and dugout travel carrying food and goods. In the early 1800s, the same waters attracted German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and other immigrants who valued the area’s natural harbor, abundant water, and fertile soils. Thousands of schooners soon sailed Lake Michigan carrying people and goods, and Milwaukee grew rapidly to become the world’s leading exporter of wheat. From the beginning, settlers altered the wetlands and rivers to improve the harbor and river access, moving the river entrance one-quarter mile north to its present location and filling wetlands in what are now downtown Milwaukee, the Third Ward, and the Menomonee Valley. The shoreline was also extended by fill, with the original shoreline more than one thousand feet west of this location, behind the Hoan Bridge. Land use changed repeatedly as well: the Summerfest grounds, established in 1970, had earlier been lake bottom, an airport, and then a Nike missile base. The land under Lakeshore State Park was the last of the lakefront fills, and in the 1980s its island portion was built from rock mined from the Deep Tunnel project, seventeen miles of tunnel below Milwaukee constructed to improve the city’s waste water treatment. Lakeshore State Park, Wisconsin’s newest and only urban state park, opened in 2007 and provides permanent access to the lakefront.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin · United States