Urban Spelunking is brought to you by Nicolet Law.
Some buildings need work as a result of a lack of love. That's definitely not why the Muellner Building in Wauwatosa's Hart Park, 7300 Chestnut St., is getting some much-needed attention right now.
Built in stages – the earliest phases were in 1938 and 1940 – the building, faced with local stone, houses the Wauwatosa Senior Center and the Wauwatosa Curling Club, both of which are extremely active.
The Muellner Building – named in 1974 for Howard Muellner, who had served as the park’s superintendent for the previous 48 years – also has rooms that can (and are) rented for weddings and other events. So, it's a busy, well-used place.
“The facility has been here for around 80 years and is in much need of some renovation,” says David Simpson, who is director of public works for Wauwatosa. “We're happy to announce that through partnerships and grants, the city is able to do this $5 million project with approximately 80 percent private funding, as well as grant funding.
“We're trying to bring the building back to its original character. We had a very 1990s-looking facade and as part of this project we're trying to bring the building back to its original character from the ‘40s.”
From the exterior, you’ll see new windows and doors that more resemble the originals, tuckpointing and work to give the main entrance its original character back.
Inside, there’s new HVAC and electrical, new roofing, solar panels to help generate electricity for the facility (Tosa is at about 50 percent solar usage in its public buildings now, according to Simpson), as well as improvements to the event spaces and the senior center rooms.
Perhaps the most striking change is the return of the large barrel-vaulted southern pine laminated timber arched ceiling in the curling rink to its original look.
As was originally the case, the wooden structure – built by Peshtigo's Unit Structures – has been revealed and will remain that way after decades of being covered up.
The $5.2 million cost is being funded with $2 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, $1.5 million raised by the Wauwatosa Curling Club, $500,000 from a hotel/motel tax and the remaining $1.12 million from Wauwatosa's capital budget.
Because the building is historically designated locally, the work required the approval of Wauwatosa's Historic Preservation Commission.
Kahler Slater was the project architect and Duffek Construction is the general contractor.
Though the building itself is roughly 80 years old, the history of the park and of the curling club go back further.
Hart Park and the Wauwatosa Curling Club
Hart Park’s roots go back to 1921, when Wauwatosa bought up 19.5 acres along the north bank of the Menomonee River with plans to create a park that would be called, rather imaginatively, City Park.
Over the next five years, a skating rink, tennis courts, playing fields and an outdoor curling facility were added at the site, which in 1929 saw the construction of a field house and a football field.
With the onset of the Great Depression and the creation of the Works Progress Administration, activity at the park ramped up further, with the WPA – which called the site the Athletic Park – taking on a host of projects including building stone walls along the river, as well as a footbridge over the Menomonee, and, later, lighting the tennis courts, building and painting fences, painting lampposts, demolishing old structures, moving an existing greenhouse and more.
By 1938, as that work was progressing, more tasks were added, including installing a sprinkler system on parkways and “performing incidental and appurtenant work.”
Also in the later phase of work were “constructing recreational building and curling rink.”
Completed first, in 1938, were the rink and its associated refrigeration plant for the Wauwatosa Curling Club, the history of which dates, like the park, to 1921, when it was started in a shed (though based on photos that word doesn't do justice to the structure) on Stickney Avenue, just south of the current City Hall.
The club moved to City Park in 1925.
The new indoor rink was the first in Wisconsin.
Then, construction of the recreation building – designed, like the curling facility, by architect Walter Domann, in collaboration, it seems, with Tosa’s City Engineering Department – followed.
The architect
Born in Madison in 1905, Walter August Domann moved as a child with his German-born parents to Milwaukee, where after working as a wagon driver and in department store (respectively) his father and mother ran a grocery store near 27th and Clarke.
Domann studied at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to work as a draftsman in the office of architect George Schley & Sons, from 1927 to ‘27. In 1930, he was back in Pennsylcania, working in the Philadelphia office of architect William Macy Stanton, but returned home to work for Martin Tullgren & Sons in 1931-32.
Three years after entering in 1932 into the Domann & Strass Architecture and Engineering firm, Domann struck out on his own, designing mostly homes first in the late 1930s in Madison and then afterward mostly in the Wauwatosa area.
However, Domann also did some commercial and other structures, too, including a YMCA and a bank in Wauwatosa, and a grocery store and a professional building in Elm Grove.
In the mid-1950s, Domann’s office was at 7616 Harwood Ave., a space now occupied by Le Reve French restaurant. But soon after he entered into partnership with Arthur O. Reddemann, who was elected president of the Wisconsin AIA chapter in 1956.
Reddemann-Domann, which had offices on 134th and Watertown Plank Road in Elm Grove, seems to have eschewed the type of single-family homes Domann had worked on in the past, opting instead to focus on churches, banks, industrial buildings, cemetery chapels and they even designed MPS’ Ralph Waldo Emerson School in 1959.
Sadly, the partnership ended with Domann’s early death, in 1962, at the age of 57.
The Muellner Building
Domann’s Colonial Revival/Georgian Revival recreation building for Wauwatosa’s City Park – which was renamed in 1960 in honor of Wauwatosa founder Charles Hart – was completed in 1940 and opened in 1941.
The building was designated a Tosa landmark in 2012.
In addition to housing Wisconsin’s artificial indoor curling ice facility – which has a clubroom and locker room in the basement – the Muellner Building is home to the Hart Park staff offices and the Wauwatosa Senior Center.
The building is also equipped with a kitchen and a number of rooms available to the community, including the small, first-floor Garden Room; the beautiful second-floor Riverview Room, with its cathedral ceiling; and the long Tosa Room, with its barrel vaulted ceiling, available only April-September, since it’s the curling facility during the remainder of the year.
There’s also the compact, adjacent ot the Firefly Room, which can be opened to offer a view into the larger neighboring space, and serves as a spectator area during the curling season.
After suffering damage from flooding two years in a row, the building underwent a renovation and expansion in 1999, including replacing light fixtures, installing new flooring in the curling rink and creating wheelchair-accessible restrooms in a former maintenance shed.
It was at this time that the addition was constructed and the senior center relocated from the City Hall complex.
Senior center programming has been temporarily relocated back to City Hall and some other sites while the center is renovated, but will be returned to the Muellner Building when work is completed. That work is expected to be completed by November.
“As part of this project, we're also re-welcoming the curling club into the facility,” says Simpson. “They were partner in the original construction of the facilities, (and) has been an integral part of this building ever since its construction.
“We’re really excited to have them here long term. They’ve been a great partner over the years and I'm sure they will continue to be so.”
According to former curling club president Kelley Burian, club membership is on an upward trend and there are currently about 375 members, who practice their sport and host competitions – some of which draw clubs from around the country and even the world – from October through March.
The club has a lower level facility that includes a kitchen and dining room, a bar and a locker room (and the standard tartan carpet as a nod to curling's Scottish roots). This beloved space will remain.
Curling can be viewed through windows from the senior center corridor, as well as from the Firefly Room – where the fireplace stones are dotted with ancient reef fossils (perhaps from nearby Hartung Park, a former quarry, or from Tosa's Schoonmaker Reef quarry, which is even closer) – or the upper-level Riverview Room with its striking arched ceiling and, at one end, a small stage.
The biggest challenge for the club, Burian says, has been maintaining proper ice temperatures and conditions due to aging ice-making infrastructure on the rink.
“We're tremendously excited,” she says, “we're getting that ice piece along with this renovation The city got an upgraded building, we got the ice that we needed and wanted and the viewing space that we needed and wanted.
“It's been a long time that the city and the club have been working on this together and the membership just really stepped up. They had a bunch of fundraising to do and it was immediate. We had groups all summer at Brewers games, for instance, working concessions to raise funds to get this project done.
“So everybody stepped up in just such a big, big way and you can feel the excitement.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
