If you’re in the market for a former library building, the City of Milwaukee of Department of City Development has got a couple for your browsing pleasure.
The old 8,234-square-foot Llewelyn Library in Bay View – built in 1913 with a 1958 addition – is for sale for $330,000 and you can read all about that building and its history here.
A much more recent structure – the old Mill Road Library – built in 1970 has been on the market since last autumn with an asking price of $180,000 for the 15,061-square-foot single-story structure and the 37,155-square-foot lot that has some green space, but mostly a paved parking lot with 27 spots, at 6431 N. 76th St.
You can see the listing here.
But note that Milwaukee Public Library spokesman Yves LaPierre says, "we have an accepted offer but are working through the City’s approval processes."
When I stopped over for a visit, about a half-dozen potential buyers were peeking into closets, climbing up onto the roof and thinking about potential reuses for the building which became vacant in May 2020 when a replacement opened in July up on Good Hope Road.
Milwaukee Public Library Construction Projects Manager Yves LaPierre says he’s opened the building numerous times for prospective buyers who have considered a variety of uses for the space, from events space to funeral home to medical or dental offices.
The building is round, with a concrete exterior, with heavy laminated joists that poke through the facade.
While there is a wall of windows to the north, facing an area filled with brush, the rest of the exterior has only two horizontal bands of narrow windows with vertical panes added at the points where the joists jut out.
Driving past – one sees very few pedestrians on this busy stretch of North 76th Street – you might not even notice the building as it sort of hunkers down on its site, nestled low to the ground and its brown wood and tan concrete serving as camouflage.
Inside, however, it actually feels more open.
The library staff occupied a big circular area ringed with a service counter in the center and stacks of books, meeting rooms, a staff break room, restrooms and other areas fanned out from that central core.
“It’s very much of its time,” says LaPierre. “People have described it as a little brutalist with the rough cement. When it was a library, a lot of the people who worked here said it could be kind of dark.”
The library was a much-needed amenity when folks gathered on Sunday, July 19, 1970 for a dedication ceremony in advance of opening day the following morning.
The site was in the old Town of Granville, which long needed library services.
For example, in 1931, the town paid Milwaukee Public Library to supply it with books at a cost of 15 cents per book. The previous year, it had spent more than $10,347 for access to 73,586 books, a cost which the town sought to begin sharing with local schools.
Even more than a decade before the City of Milwaukee annexed Granville in 1956, Milwaukeeans on the far Northwest Side wondered why the Common Council was dragging its feet on building a much-needed branch out that way.
The problem only got worse in the wake of World War II when the entire Northwest Side would see a huge post-war building boom.
By the dawn of the 1960s, plans were underway for that Northwest Library, which would open four years later on 74th and Capitol. But by the time the ribbon was cut on that branch, city leaders were discussing another branch and a neighborhood health center even further north.
In an April 11, 1962 letter to the Common Council, City Librarian Richard E. Krug sought funding for a bookmobile to serve residents on the far Northwest Side.
“The Board of Trustees, Milwaukee Public Library, is proceeding with activities toward acquisition of a neighborhood library site in the far northwestern part of the city, formerly Town of Granville,” he wrote. “In the meantime, residents in former Granville, now a part of the City of Milwaukee according to the last court action, should be provided with a minimum library service, that is, bookmobile library service.
“In order to provide this library bookmobile service, which should certainly start no later than June of this year, we hereby request an allocation of $4,000 in order that we will be in a position to hire a bookmobile driver from the Bureau of Municipal Equipment. We would be enabled to provide bookmobile service in the former Granville area for the remaining seven months of 1962.”
That same year, the City put together a 10-year libraries plan, which included an additional branch in the vicinity of 76th and Mill Road.
In 1963, Mayor Henry Maier suggested that the city consider buying a piece of land sufficient to build both the new library and health center, and potentially other municipal buildings, on just one site.
“The City is endeavoring to acquire the site on the northeast corner of North 76th Street and West Good Hope Road, which is presently owned by Brown Deer School district, for various municipal facilities,” Capital Improvements Committee Executive Secretary Clarence Beernink wrote in a letter to Krug in February 1964. “This is the site that we are expecting to use for location of the proposed health center, and possibly a fire house site.
“It is also the site upon which the mayor suggested that library could also be located rather than on North 76th Street and West Mill Road. In order that some consideration be given to the mayor’s views as he then expressed them, I believe that you should consult with the members of the City Plan Commission staff and your library sites committee of the Board of Trustees so that the Capital Improvements Committee may have your recommendations when this matter will again be before them in May or June of this year.”
In the end, the health center and library did indeed end up next door to one another, however it was at 76th and Mill Road rather than 76th and Good Hope Road. The health center, which still occupies its part of the site, was constructed in 1968.
But library construction would not come fast enough.
In 1967, Ald. Clarence M. Miller asked for a temporary library for his burgeoning district until the new branch could be built but his colleagues demurred, with some of the dissenting alders expressing the belief that doing so would undermine city’s 1962 10-year library plan.
Fortunately, by July 1969, a building permit was filed and Lorenz Construction could begin work on the new library building, designed by the firm of Burroughs and Van Lanen, which had designed the 1966 Forest Home Library, when Fritz von Grossmann was a partner.
Work began on July 24 and six days shy of exactly one year later, the $400,000 building opened.
For the next half century, this branch served its neighborhood as a library, a community meeting space, a voting site and more.
Then, during the Covid pandemic, it was closed as work to move to a new home – a $6.35 million library in a $19 million mixed-use development with 65 affordable apartments – began. The new site would become MPL’s third-largest branch, with an 18,400-square-foot space designed by Zimmerman Architectural Studios.
In 2021, the Health Department leased the old library building for use as a Covid vaccination site and there was discussion of transferring the building to that department’s portfolio.
However, once the vaccine clinic closed, the building became vacant and has remained so ever since.
Hopefully, that will change.
“We are looking at an offer right now," says MPL’s LaPierre. "It’s just such a unique building and It’s (been) hard for people to figure out what to do with it.
“With the age of the building, it would be a big renovation project, so you’d have to find financing and your own money to put into it as well. It needs work on the roof, HVAC needs to be updated. We kept it going; the library maintained it up until we opened the new building.”
LaPierre says that most prospective buyers who came to see the library seemed to want to keep it rather than tear it down to building something new on the site, which is what happened at Forest Home Library a few years ago.
“We entertain(ed) any offers,” he says. “There’s not a lot of room for (something like) a strip mall, (and) new construction is expensive. I imagine somebody would try to find an adaptive reuse for it.”
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.
