Photo credit: Kevin Walzak
North Point Lighthouse
When the architect of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, came to Milwaukee to design Lake Park, he worked around a landmark already on the bluffs—the North Point Lighthouse. The lighthouse was situated between a pair of ravines that Olmsted connected with a bridge guarded on both sides by stone lions. Olmsted planted the bald bluffs with trees, which grew so thick and tall that by 1912, the ship-guiding beacon was obscured. To compensate, a steel addition was added to the cast-iron lighthouse, raising it above treetops to a height of 74 feet.
The historic structure’s future fell into doubt when the U.S. Coast Guard decommissioned it in 1994. The adjacent, whitewashed Queen Anne house—the lighthouse keeper’s quarters—crumbled until it was saved through the efforts of neighborhood activists and historic preservationists. Leasing the property from Milwaukee County, the North Point Lighthouse Friends opened the keeper’s quarters and the lighthouse as the North Point Lighthouse Museum in 2007. It became part of the Milwaukee Museum Mile in 2011.
“There were lots of questions as to what would happen to this,” says North Point Lighthouse Friends Board President John Scripp. He refers to proposals including turning the house into a youth hostel or a bed and breakfast. The community association he headed liked neither idea. “We decided we had to do more than say ‘no’ before someone came along with a bad idea and the funds to do it,” Scripp continues.
The Friends’ good idea—self-funded through admissions, donations and rentals (albeit aided at the onset by a federal historic restoration grant)—has blossomed into a small but ample museum and a successful experiment in environmental management. As North Point’s marketing manager Kevin Walzak recounts, the North Point Lighthouse Friends installed a driveway of porous pavers to filter rainwater and received funding for it with the help of the Fund for Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District—conditional upon constructing a Regenerative Stormwater Conveyance (RSC) system on the grounds.
“It was a new concept for managing storm water where it falls in places with steep inclines,” Walzak explains. The North Point’s RSC consists of a series of step pools designed to catch storm water as it descends the bluffs toward the lake carrying bacteria and debris as well as causing erosion. Several raingardens have also been planted around the lighthouse with flowering plants indigenous to Wisconsin to absorb pollutants.
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Photo credit: John Surges
North Point Lighthouse staircase
A View of Milwaukee
Climbing to the top of the lighthouse for a 360-degree panorama of Milwaukee is only one of the museum’s attractions. The keeper’s quarters house a collection of North Point Lighthouse memorabilia, including keepsakes from the most interesting among the lighthouse’s keepers, Georgia Stebbins. She climbed the spiral stairs to the top of the tower and tended the beacon from 1888 through 1907, an era when American women were seldom the boss anywhere save, perhaps, their homes. But the collection encompasses not just North Point but Great Lakes maritime history.
Arrayed among the timelines and text panels is the brass fog bell that once warned sailors at the mouth of Milwaukee harbor and a batch of relics from ships that sank on the lakes. There are paintings and models of the schooners and steamers that plied the waters in earlier times. Two of the great multi-faceted Fresnel lanterns, resembling giant glass Brussels sprouts or asparagus heads, give museumgoers a close-up on the source of light that guided mariners through the dark.
On loan from the Milwaukee County Historical Society and covering much of one wall is a large WPA-era painting depicting the original Milwaukee lighthouse, which stood at the dead-end of Wisconsin Avenue roughly where Mark di Suvero’s The Calling (the orange sunburst sculpture) sits today. “We used to be a beacon for ships; today, we are a beacon for visitors from all over the world,” says curator Mark P. Kuehn. “We aren’t just a receptacle for artifacts,” he continues, pointing to the museum’s use as a meeting place for community organizations and weddings as well as lectures on Milwaukee and Great Lakes history. Kuehn is currently planning an exhibition on the Kaszube, the fisher folk who inhabited Jones Island when it was an island.
The North Point Friends gained money and expertise through the diverse backgrounds of its members and supporters. “We had park-oriented people and East Side-oriented people,” Scripp says. “And then we had an influx of lighthouse-oriented people who weren’t necessarily from the neighborhood but who brought an understanding of what went on here. We want people to realize that this is more than just a Nantucket postcard.”
Walzak adds, “There’s a natural draw to a lighthouse; people are attracted to the romance of it, but once they’re in the door at North Point, people are surprised by what’s in here—the artifacts that tell stories about Milwaukee and the Great Lakes. The mission of the Friends was not just to restore the buildings but to reach out to the community, the East Side and beyond, to embrace the property as part of the region’s history.”
