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To the naked eye, the old ice house near Foxtown Brewing in Mequon has vanished.
But within the sparkling new Foxtown Station events venue, along the railroad tracks and the old Interurban rail corridor, at 6209 W. Mequon Rd., lie remnants and hints of the former structure.
Having said that, much of the icehouse had disintegrated and was deemed unsalvageable and was demolished. It's unclear exactly when the icehouse was built, but it's possible it dates to the earliest days of the brewery in the 1850s.
But the lumber sheds that flanked it – which were constructed much later, around 1959 and '64 – have survived and were reinforced and integrated into Foxtown Station.
I remember visiting the decrepit icehouse before the pandemic and found it oddly beautiful, with soaring multi-story studs, the likes of which you’d never see today. But it didn’t look long for this world.
The icehouse appeared to originally be a gabled building to which a second gabled building was added and then later, the V-shaped gap between the two gables was, at some point, filled in.
On the west facade were a large garage-sized door and to its right was a standard door, boarded up.
On the east facade, facing the railroad tracks were floor to ceiling openings that had been filled with corrugated metal sheets.
The center portion of the new building, which sits on the icehouse site, has tall, slim vertical windows that recall these openings in the earlier building.
Another garage door-sized opened faced south toward a couple open-sided sheds, presumably from the lumber yard era.
Inside, there were a few windows still visible, even though they’d been covered over on the exterior.
Those two-story studs were each a single, incredibly long piece of timber. Support posts were hand-hewn. Numerous joints had been reinforced by hammering boards over the connection points.
The icehouse served the brewery that sat nearby in the 19th century, occupying buildings that are now home to Foxtown Brewing.
You can read about the brewing history of the site and about Foxtown Brewing here.
With two event spaces, an arcade-style game room, a bar, kitchens, an outdoor stage, outdoor bar and plenty of flexible space outside, the 18,000-square-foot Foxtown Station (with another 10,000 square feet outside) adds another dimension to the development led by Tom Nieman, owner of Fromm Family Pet Foods and Foxtown Brewing.
Much like Kohler, Foxtown feels almost entirely self-contained, with multiple restaurants and bars, a butcher shop, a soon-to-reopen coffee shop, a fitness center, multiple apartment buildings and even some detached houses.
Foxtown Station has beautiful woodwork throughout, plus hardwood, terrazzo and inlaid tile floors. In one wall there is a gorgeous stained glass window created by Shorewood’s Oxford Art Glass Studio using vintage glass.
Light fixtures throughout were made by Milwaukee’s Brass Light Gallery and there are great wrought iron coat racks and other details fabricated in Thiensville by blacksmith Sam Laturi.
Some of the timbers used in the new construction are solid 12x12 beams are Douglas Fir sourced from the Pacific Northwest.
The south banquet hall has been in use since spring, the north since autumn. Both halls have overhead garage doors that open to outdoor spaces, as well as cocktail rails and other amenities.
There is a plating kitchen on the hall level, too. Foxtown’s own restaurants will serve as primary caterers for events.
The outdoor space has already hosted live music and some other events since last summer.
The central space, on the icehouse footprint, was recently completed, but has already been used for a couple events, though its official opening is slated for Jan. 26.
“We really want to kind of think of it as a place for the community of Mequon to kind of gather together a little bit,” says Foxtown’s Director of Operations Scott Roekle.
“As of the end of this month, this (central portion) will be open to the public with a concession.
“We've also done markets in here, as well. We had a big holiday market here where we had vendors that were selling all their goods between all the halls and right through here.”
The arcade – which has pinball, Frogger and other classic arcade games, as well as table tennis – will also be open to the public on a regular basis and will be a place guests at ballroom events can use, too.
“We have young kids coming here, but imagine having a wedding over there or a wedding over there. They'd come together in the middle here and be able to use this whole space then for games for the kids to kind of mess around,” says Roekle.
“Right now it's going to be open on Friday from 4 to 9 and Saturdays from 11 till 4 and we're going to expand those hours as we build trust with the community that it's not going to be a messy place for people to go.”
Plans for future events include a Maifest on May 4 as well as an upcoming Kolsch beer festival. There’s also talk of farmers markets, an Oktoberfest and more.
As we walk through, architect Eric Nesseth of Stephen Perry Smith Architects – which also recently designed the new Downtown Milwaukee Tool building – points out bit of the original buildings peeking through the sparkling new finishes.
“It's the same footprint,” he says. “The wings were the original buildings that we just reclad and put a new roof on the top. We just added the insulation on top and then we had to sister all of the structures together, you can see that there's two sets of structure there.
“The only thing that we took down was the center icehouse because of decay. We tried to bring back the look of the timbers that were here in the coffered ceiling.”
Nesseth points to narrow, floor-to-ceiling windows and adds, “these vertical windows, we kept the original locations where those were.”
The complex is adjacent to CP Rail tracks that are still in use, as well as the Interurban Trail, which follows the right of way of the old The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company's Interurban line that ran from Milwaukee all the way up to Sheboygan.
With the completion of Foxtown Station, Nesseth says that the development of the site is now complete, though he says there’s other work that the architects are doing for Foxtown and Nieman, including the Foxtown Landing project along the river in Downtown Milwaukee and the construction of a production distillery in Germantown.
More details are expected to come soon on those projects. The design of the landing, which was approved by the Third Ward architectural review board, which has oversight on the riverfront location, has been altered somewhat and thus must go back to the board in the coming months for another approval.
Stay tuned for more on those projects.
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.
