In April we reported on the 1928 lakefront English Tudor revival mansion at 4640 N. Lake Dr. that received initial approval to be torn down.
You can get the background on the house – designed by architect Richard Philipp, who also designed The American Club in Kohler – in this article. A final appeal to save the house failed and on Tuesday, a team of volunteers and employees from Habitat for Humanity's ReStore began salvaging details from the home for sale in its Milwaukee stores.
Work continued through Thursday and many of the items are already in stock at the Wauwatosa ReStore location. All are marked with tags noting they're from the 1928 Lake Drive mansion. You'll also be able to see items on the shop's Facebook page.
It its first salvage operation since the shutdown, the ReStore folks have been saving doors, windows, fireplace surrounds (when possible), railings, kitchen cabinets and more.
Habitat's Jake Brandt tells me that they expect to extract items with a priced value of about $15,000.
Hopefully, the items will find new uses in other buildings and, at the same, will help fund Habitat's mission to build homes in the city.
You can read about exactly that kind of outcome in this post about items salvaged from another Lake Drive mansion that were used in a new restaurant build-out.
Habitat for Humanity expects to finish its salvage operation on Tuesday.
Here is a last look inside the mansion via photos taken on Thursday:
Fruit on the outside, and on the inside
A doorway between the living and sun rooms
The entry hall
Main staircase
This is where you'd find me reading
The view from the nook
Living room
Dining room
Breakfast room
Basement ballroom
Gothic elements everywhere
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.
