It was officially known as the “North Point Water Intake Crib,” but to Milwaukeeans of a certain age, it will always be “Love Rock.” The awkward lump of concrete sat about 3,000 feet off of Bradford Beach was for decades was a sight more familiar on the lakefront than seagulls, farmer tans or even Dick Bacon.
The crib was built in the early 1890s as an improvement to the city’s water works. The crib would connect a pair of intake pipes from the lake to the shore. In 1893, a terrible spring storm had wrecked the worker’s house, which had been built on top of the crib as a crew of 15 worked on-site. With the top of the structure torn away, the storm lashed at the stranded men and filled the structure with water. Despite heroic efforts to save the men, only one of the 15 would survive.
After the disaster, work continued on the crib and it was put into service later that year. It served the city’s water works until 1938 when the Linwood treatment plant went online. For the next 25 years, the pipes and crib sat idle, unused although maintained and functional as a back-up intake system. In 1963, the city decommissioned the entire works and there was—for a time—talk of dismantling the crib, which stood about 10-15 feet above the water line. The unsightly slab was considered an eyesore and a possible hazard to small craft. But the common council balked at the $125,000 cost of removing the structure and failed to act.
And so it sat there, unused except for boaters who explored it as a curiosity. But in 1971, a trio of friends had a goof of an idea that ended up created an iconic piece of counter-cultural Milwaukee.
As reported by Journal-Sentinel columnist Jim Stingl in 2009, it was Mike Manske, Dan Hoffman, and Mike Moser—three pals who were working a summer job at north-side chicken restaurant—who had the idea to canoe out to the rock and paint “LOVE” on the shore-facing side. They made their way to the rock late at night and even signed their work, with a smaller “MDM” tag, their initials. The plan was “nothing heavy,” Hoffman later told Stingl, “It was just for fun.” The LOVE was painted over a couple of years later with a painting of a sailboat, but the trio went back out to reassert their message. And “Love Rock” it would remain.
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In 1978, with the letters badly faded, a Milwaukee teen named Claire Moore took up the job of restoring the landmark. Moore, her younger sister, and pair of friends rode inflatable rafts and an air mattress to the rock and touched up the work with red spray paint. “We ended up paddling with our hands or swimming all the way out there,” Moore told Stingl in 2009 as she was preparing to share her tale during a Turner Hall presentation of The Moth. “We were very lucky that the weather was cooperative.” The US Coast Guard was also surprisingly cooperative and, after stopping the kids on their way back to shore, gave them a ride home and only cited them for failing to wear life jackets.
A third version of “LOVE” (of origins unknown) was on the rock in 1986, when the city finally came up with the funds for its removal. By then, it had badly deteriorated and the Coast Guard worried for the safety of the many trespassers who used the rock for various illicit activities. That September, what the Journal called “one of the least-admired of Milwaukee’s lakefront landmarks” was blown up and send to the bottom of the lake. The “love” was gone, but is not forgotten.
