Photo: City of Wauwatosa
Hartung Park maze
Hartung Park
From 1910 to 1961 Hartung Quarry, located along the Menomonee River Parkway, was located in a residential neighborhood between Burleigh Street and Capitol Drive. The quarry was named after Wauwatosa farmer Frederick Hartung who began quarrying the land in 1910 and excavating out the mineral dolomite that was used in constructing home and businesses in the area.
Photo: Milwaukee Public Museum
Hartung Park - 1930s
Hartung Quarry in the 1930s
The quarry was over 100 feet deep and approximately three million tons of rock was quarried. It became a dump in the 1960s and was converted into a park in 2010. The city used the 17-acre site as a landfill for clean construction waste from 1964 until it reached its capacity. The quarry was used to dump garbage and was renamed as the Hartung Quarry Landfill. Milwaukee was very careful operating the landfill by only dumping clean waste because there was a plan that existed for some time to convert the area into a park.
The city-owned landfill was surrounded by a single-family neighborhood and for over 50 years, trucks had been roaring through its streets. After the neighborhood was built up, residents opposed the noise and the dirt and ultimately the landfill was closed. When the quarry shut down, the rock quarry’s gigantic hole slowly filled up with dirt and concrete from prior excavations as neighborhood grew around it.
Daredevil Boys
Photo: Hartung Park Community Association
Hartung Park - 1950s
Hartung Quarry in the 1950s
During the late ‘50s neighbors recall the whistle blowing before blasts would go off. Many homes would shake. resulting in many families moving out of the area. During the ‘60s and ‘70s daredevil boys in the neighborhood rode their bikes for adventures on the quarry shelves.
Operated by Wauwatosa and the City of Milwaukee, Hartung Park opened in 2010 and uses green infrastructure to help keep water pollution out of Milwaukee area rivers and Lake Michigan. Residents in the surrounding neighborhood fully supported a plan to convert it into a park by covering the contaminated fill with clean soil and grass.
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The amenities include bronze statues representing the fossils of organisms that inhabited the area in the Silurian Period (more than 400 million years ago). One fossil, the trilobite, is recognized as the Wisconsin State Fossil. Even though it has been many years since the source bedrock was exposed, I wonder if there are still fossils to be found. Probably not, but when it comes to history, my curiosity always overpowers.
