More than a year and a half after Northwestern Mutual announced plans to remodel a building and move almost 2,000 employees from Franklin to Downtown Milwaukee – and a year after that project got underway – NM offered a peek inside the work on Thursday.
The company is spending about $500 million to transform the 395-foot-tall 1990 North Tower designed by Madison-based Flad Architects on the north side of Mason Street, between Cass and Marshall Streets.
That effort began on the inside last year, says NM’s Assistant Director of Construction Management Tracy Lutterman, before the project became especially visible by moving to the exterior.
“What we accomplished in the last year was removing everything from the building, including all of our furnishings, carpet, attic stock of equipment,” she says, as we stand on an open section of the 18th floor, overlooking the Milwaukee lakefront and the company’s 2017 tower across Mason Street.
“NM took care of that and we recycled it, donated it. We ended up diverting 1.3 million pounds of waste from the building. We worked with our community partners to donate a lot of that furniture. So it all went to a great use and we reused some of it ourselves, too,” Lutterman adds.
“Since then we've taken the entire skin off the building. Now we can see the work going on to extend out our floor plate (to create a) curvature that matches our tower next door.”
That redesign is part of the work to make the formerly gray stone-clad 540,000-square-foot building’s exterior mirror its taller sibling across the street.
The 550-foot, 32-story Tower and Commons project was designed by architects Pickard Chilton, which also did the work to redesign the shorter 19-story North Tower.
During the visit we saw the roof, which offers stunning views – as do many of the floors below – and we saw steel workers install one of the beams that is creating the curvature.
Before that work could begin, says Gilbane Construction’s Jake Poull, who is one of the superintendents on the job, some reinforcement work had to take place for some structural elements to handle the added weight.
The building demo, he says, has offered few surprises.
“Nothing too crazy,” he says. “You always find something in mass demo like this. But it was cool to see how well the structure was built. It was originally started in ‘87, ‘88 and opened in ‘90, and they didn’t build buildings to this magnitude back then, so it was huge to realize we were able to keep this and build off of it. It saves a lot of work.”
On the second floor we saw an area that is being used to mock up detail-heavy areas like restrooms.
“When we took the panels on the outside of the building down, we started at the top and worked our way down,” Lutterman explains. “Now we're building back up from the bottom up. So this is an in-place mock-up of what we're going to see for restrooms going all the way up.
“There are lots of details in construction, right? So we mock it up here, we all get in a meeting, come in and check and make sure everything's where it should be, including where the back of house stuff is, where the plumbing is, and making sure that our staff that's going to take care of this building going forward, that they have access to everything that they need. We make sure it's right here before they keep going up.”
Back outside, we see the new section of building being constructed over what had been North Cass Street to create a lobby with a green roof and rooftop garden that will connect the tower to the existing parking structure to the west, which is also being renovated.
The parking structure, says Lutterman, is currently closed for safety but is expected to reopen to employees next year. That’s ahead of the tower, which is expected to be open, on schedule, in early 2027.
The North Tower will remain connected to the Tower and Commons across Mason Street by an existing skywalk.
According to Lutterman a number of the spaces in the new complex will be open to the public, including two patios, a public plaza and the lobby with an adjacent area that is being called the conservatory.
“This whole project has been about doubling down on Milwaukee,” Lutterman says. “This is our home headquarters. We want to invest here. So part of that is investing not only in our employees and the future, but it's also about investing in the community. So we've got community space that we'll see when we look down on our plaza.”
That echoes what Northwestern Mutual Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer John Schlifske said in a statement when the project was announced in February 2023.
"Our decision to build the Tower and Commons downtown made a huge statement about metro Milwaukee's attractiveness as a place to live and work and created job opportunities for our broader community that continue to have a ripple effect to this day.
"We believe in Milwaukee – which has been our hometown for nearly all of our 165-plus year history – which is why we were up to the challenge to ensure we met and exceeded the bold hiring goals advanced with the city.”
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.
