Nearly three years ago I visited and was wowed and saddened by the 1904 home of Summerfield United Methodist Church, 728 E. Juneau Ave.
Wowed by the beautiful building with its incredible colored glass skylight.
You can read a history of the church here.
Saddened by the bleak outlook for its future.
Indeed, a year later, I learned that the building – one of two of similar design by Chicago-based Turnbull & Jones (the other is in Omaha) – was closing and likely being sold.
At the time, according to City of Milwaukee data, the property had an assessed value of $300,000.
In May, a fire caused damage to the second floor of the adjacent parsonage, which was not encouraging.
However, in September, Chicago-based developer JODI Development LLC purchased the former church for $715,000 and after connecting with Milwaukee Preservation Alliance, spoke to me about its plans for the building.
“We're just kind of getting started here,” JODI's John Searls says, explaining that JODI plans a residential development – with the number of units to be determined – that would not likely include new construction.
“We are very excited about this church. One of our specialties is adaptive reuses. We've done many religious facilities in the past – synagogues, churches. A lot of times we'll do a complete adaptive reuse of a church building, and in many cases there's a parking lot on the site, so we're able to do a ground-up construction component along with it.
“On this particular site because we want to do everything we can to save the parsonage. I don't know that that's going to be possible.”
There is not a specific plan yet for the building, but, says Searls, “I can tell you that is that our intention is to do an adaptive reuse of the church and the parsonage.
“There are some amazing architectural features to the church, inside and out, no doubt about it, and obviously the exterior is a huge part of our developments and they bring a lot of curb appeal. But we find that it's the little treasures inside that can really make the apartments unique once we start doing the build out.”
In the short term, JODI is turning off the water to prevent any burst pipes over the winter and doing some preliminary work.
“We’ve spoken with MPA several times,” Searls says. “We actually met them out at the building at one point. We are just about to secure a company to do a laser scan for us so that we know exactly what we have there.
“Then we can start to lay out apartments and start to think about entrances and fire exits and all those things.”
Searls says one of the issues to solve will be parking.
“Parking, which is a big thing in a residential development, is not only a requirement by the city, but also we feel like Milwaukee is on its way to being a city that doesn't have parking requirements, but it's not quite there yet, at least in our opinion.
“So we're going to have to do parking because of the zoning ordinance, but we also feel like the market demands some parking, as well.”
At this stage, without a clear plan yet, Searls says there are a lot of unknowns, including the cost of renovation and a timeline for the project.
“As we get further along in our design and start to do some budgeting exercises, obviously (cost) is a big part of what we need to figure out,” he says.
And as far as a timeline goes...
“A lot of it depends on how quickly we can get through the city approvals,” Searls adds. “One thing we're attempting to do – not that we are sure we can do it yet – is we're trying to do this project without any discretionary approvals so that we can take the existing zoning of the site today and design our project within that zoning and not have to ask for anything over and above that.
“There may be some small discretionary approvals that we have to ask for, but we always like to keep that to a minimum because that just slows the process down. And from our perspective, the faster we can get a building permit, rehab the building and get our tenants in there, the better off we're going to be.
“Right now the money's going in the wrong direction, but we're going to turn that around.”
Answers to these questions will come and Searls promises to keep us in the loop so we can update you.
“Right now we're kind of in the early stages,” the developer says, “but yeah, we're really excited about giving this building a second life. This is what we do. We love doing this. We've turned lemons into lemonade in many other buildings, and that's what we're hoping to do here.”
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.
