Walnut Way Peach Tree
In the beginning, they planted tulips. Back in 2000, as Walnut Way Conservation Corporation was forming, Lindsay Heights neighbors planted 1,000 tulip bulbs because they wanted to see something beautiful growing in a vacant lot on north 17th St. where a house once stood. They wanted to send a message that Lindsay Heights was worth building up and not tearing down.
From its inception almost 20 years ago, Walnut Way used urban agriculture to beautify Lindsay Heights and bring together the residents of this blighted and neglected North Side area to heal and empower the neighborhood. “The mission of Walnut Way is to sustain economically diverse and abundant communities through civic engagement,” says Tyler Weber, program manager of catalytic development at Walnut Way. “Our founders are from the neighborhood. Our board at any given time must be at least 51% neighbors. There’s a focus on abundance and how important local economics are.”
Lindsay Heights spans from west Walnut St. on the south to west Locust St. on the north and stretches west from I-43 (Eighth St.) to 20th Street. Forty years of disinvestment had left the Lindsay Heights neighborhood in shambles, plagued with high poverty, crime, incarceration and unemployment rates and low educational achievement.
During the Great Migration, which started in the 1920s and continued through 1970, millions of blacks fled the South to escape Jim Crow laws and to find better economic opportunities in the North. However, they faced racism and segregation in the North as well. In 1950, the Lindsay Heights neighborhood had few blacks. By 1960, 65% of the population in Lindsay Heights was black. Redlining, the practice of denying lending to minorities and minority communities, hit Lindsay Heights hard, and residents could not get financing to buy their own homes. In the 1960s, freeway development resulted in the razing of thousands of homes and displaced thousands of people who lived along the I-43 corridor and in the path of the proposed Park West Freeway near North Avenue, further fragmenting the neighborhood.
To complicate matters, by the early 1970s, Milwaukee’s economy began to decline. Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the city were lost, and property values fell. Redlining was also practiced in Chicago, New York and many other cities, but in Milwaukee the effect was compounded by bad timing. As black migrants continued to arrive in large numbers, Milwaukee's manufacturing economy was shrinking.
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Peaches and Dreams
In 2006, Walnut Way founders Sharon and Larry Adams renovated an abandoned house at 2240 N. 17th St., which now houses the Walnut Way offices. After consulting with seniors in Lindsay Heights, they then planted a peach orchard in the garden next door. It was a creative act meant to bridge the generations and honor the elders who had memories of better times in the neighborhood.
They remembered a time 50 years earlier when fruits trees, especially peach trees, grew in abundance. They had fond memories of picking sun-kissed peaches off the tree on a hot summer day. “They took an empty lot and turned it into a peach orchard,” says Antonio Butts, Walnut Way executive director. “Now, there’s a generation of kids on the block who don’t know what it’s like not to have fresh peaches growing there every summer.” In 2017, Walnut Way harvested 780 pounds of peaches from its urban orchards.
Lindsay Heights is home to 2,700 families and has almost 40,000 residents. There are at least eight active neighborhood associations in Lindsay Heights and half a dozen churches. Walnut Way has a strong history of partnering with local residents and other neighborhood organizations who have had faith in the resilience of the neighborhood to rebuild, revitalize and heal itself. In fewer than 20 years, Walnut Way has renovated more than 100 homes and turned more than 20 vacant lots into orchards, gardens and green spaces. Walnut Way uses revenues from its produce sales to fund these projects and harvests 3,000 pounds of food annually from its gardens and orchards.
In addition, Walnut Way’s Blue Skies Landscaping program supplies nearly 50% of Walnut Way’s revenues. It has 14 employees from the neighborhood and paid more than $300,000 in wages in 2017. “Walnut Way is a Milwaukee leader and is becoming a national leader in combining green infrastructure development with job training that creates long-term, family wage jobs. The Blue Skies Landscaping program is creating green jobs for a very challenged community,” says Tim McCollow, program manager of Home Gr/own Milwaukee.
Home Gr/own partnered with Walnut Way to build nine pocket parks within the city, which include Ezekiel Gillespie Park, Fondy Park and Sunshine Park in Lindsay Heights. These landscaping projects manage storm water while beautifying and greening vacant lots. Blue Skies Landscaping also did the landscaping on the seven-acre site of the new St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care on North Ave. between 24th and 25th streets.
This year, Walnut Way received MMSD’s Green Luminary award for connecting workforce development and green infrastructure in its projects, and it was also one of six recipients of a $150,000 grant from the Institute for Sustainable Communities (Walnut Way competed with 51 applicants nationwide). The grant will be used for solar energy projects and storm water infrastructure in Lindsay Heights.
It Takes a Neighborhood
For many years, west North Ave. was a thriving business corridor that served the local community, but then businesses abandoned their North Ave. stores and offices as the neighborhood spiraled into economic and social decline. “For a long period of time—decades—more than half of the buildings on North Ave. between Fond du Lac Ave. and the freeway have been empty. There are no jobs, no one is cleaning up the trash, no one is calling about crime, no one is saying traffic is moving too fast here. It’s not providing walkable spaces. It’s not providing spaces for social connectivity,” says Weber.
For a year, Walnut Way brought 70 neighborhood partners together to plan how best to revitalize the North Ave. corridor. They asked: What’s needed? What could be here? What’s possible? Eventually, they had a $2 million capital campaign so that it could buy the building at 16th and North, which then became the Innovations and Wellness Commons. The building opened in 2015 and houses the Fondy Farmers Market administrative offices, Juice Kitchen, Outpost Learning Center and The Milwaukee Center for Independence. It won a Milwaukee Award for Neighborhood Development Innovation (MANDI) in 2017.
“One of the aspects of the work begun 10 years ago, which is still present today, is in building an infrastructure of organizations and relationships in the neighborhood,” says Susan Lloyd, executive director of the Zilber Family Foundation. Though the foundation works closely with Walnut Way, it also partners with other organizations, including Neu-Life Community Development, Fondy Food Market, Lindsay Heights Health Alliance and Johnsons Park. “Sharon Adams [Walnut Way’s founder] was and is very adept at building relationships both within and outside the neighborhood to make sure there are always a lot of people who care about the same things,” Lloyd adds.
Opened in 2015, the Innovations and Wellness Commons sparked a spate of new development on North Ave. Walnut Way’s partnership with other community organizations to rebuild the North Ave. business corridor is part of an effort get more of the community’s money to recirculate within Lindsay Heights at local businesses. It is estimated that $27 million is spent outside the neighborhood because residents can’t spend it in the Lindsay Heights neighborhood. New construction, green space development and rehabbing and repurposing of older buildings are taking place, and more is being planned; a critical mass for a neighborhood renaissance seems to be forming. For example, heading west on North Ave. through Bronzeville toward Lindsay Heights, at the northwest corner of Martin Luther King Drive and North Ave., is the new Pete’s Market, which opened last year and won two 2018 MANDIs. At the corner of Fourth St. a block west is a newly constructed, multi-use building that is the new home of America’s Black Holocaust Museum (slated to open this fall). The museum is just one block away from the office of the Milwaukee Urban League.
West of the freeway, in Lindsay Heights proper, the newly constructed Prince Hall apartments at 11th St. stands next door to the old Prince Hall Masonic Lodge. At 13th St. is the Milwaukee College Prep Lola Rowe Campus (opened in 2014), which is adjacent to the Northside YMCA; the latter has housed a Children’s Hospital Clinic since 2014. Across the street from the Innovation and Wellness Common, the Legacy Lofts are being carved out of the old Blommer ice cream factory, and a newly-constructed apartment building next door is almost completed. The Bucyrus Campus of the St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care, which opened in 2016, provides child and adult daycare and has an on-site community medical clinic. It is located on a seven-acre former brownfield between 24th and 25th streets. St. Ann employs about 100 people from the neighborhood.
Fond du Lac Avenue cuts a diagonal through Lindsay Heights, and this street has also seen many positive changes. Next door to the Fondy Farmers Market at 22nd and Fond du Lac is Fondy Park, which won a 2018 MANDI. Johnsons Park, near 17th St. and Fond du Lac Ave., once a crime haven, has now been greened and redeveloped. On Johnsons Park’s west side are Alice’s Garden, a 2.2-acre urban farm, and Brown Street Academy. Recently, North Avenue was repaved between Eighth and 20th Streets. Fifty hanging flower baskets have been installed along the business corridor between Eighth and 24th Streets.
Plans on the Drawing Board
Phase II development of the Innovations and Wellness Commons is tentatively scheduled to begin within the next year in a parking lot adjacent to the current building. First floor tenants in the Phase II building, include a Milwaukee JobsWork satellite office, a locally owned cafe and bakery and the African American Chamber of Commerce. The second floor will house the Walnut Way Center of Wellness, which will host yoga, meditation and healing groups, and the Center for the Arts and Community, which will have acting classes, poetry readings and art galleries.
Kalan Haywood of the Haywood Group bought the old Sears parcel at Fond du Lac and North avenues last February. He is seeking community input on the redevelopment of the 6.5-acre site. The Sears building will be demolished, and mixed-use development is planned. Final plans have not yet been announced. Possibly, Haywood will also build multi-family housing at a nearby site.
Phase II construction at the Bucyrus Campus of St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care will add dementia care units, respite care space, a swimming pool, an intergenerational art room, beauty salon and band shell; landscaped walking paths will be completed this fall. When the new addition opens, another 100 people from the neighborhood will be employed.
Sharon and Larry Adams plan to build Adams Garden Park, a destination garden center on Fond du Lac Ave., across the street from Johnsons Park. The project consists of multiple sites on Lloyd St., Fond du Lac Ave. and north 18th St. and will include orchards and nurseries, stores that sell seasonal stock and a bed and breakfast. Plans include renovation and buildout of an existing building at 1836 W. Fond du Lac Ave. that will be a hub for nonprofits committed to environmental and social justice. Future tenants are expected to include the Milwaukee Environmental Consortium, Milwaukee Water Commons and the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters Institute.
“It’s very exciting in terms of what’s happening with development on North Ave.,” says Sr. Edna Lonergan, director of St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care. “It’s going to be sought after by developers very soon.”
Neighborhoods at a Tipping Point?
The pace of commercial development in Lindsay Heights has picked up significantly in the past few years. “The question is whether Lindsay Heights is at a tipping point and will continue on the path of increasing prosperity in the neighborhood,” says Lloyd. “How do we ensure this after 20 years of investment?” Another question is how to manage the growth going forward, assuming that it continues at this rapid pace. Since its inception, Walnut Way has always kept to a model of including residents in planning. Neighborhood groups and organizations, including Zilber, St. Ann and the Haywood Group, have stuck to this successful model when implementing new projects. “Neighbors really did come together, and they have done some very significant catalytic initiatives to turn things around and move them in a different direction,” Butts says.
Walnut Way wants to make sure that neighborhood residents remain on board as stakeholders. “When we come now with a more robust strategy around reinvestment, how do we protect the people who have been here and not prevent them from being a part of the revitalization of the neighborhood?” Butts asks. “Wealth is what we’re talking about when we talk about catalytic developments in our economic corridors. We want to create economic inclusion for organizations, individuals and families in the neighborhood to find pathways to invest, gain equity and have some sense of ownership so that folks have a stake in it.” About 36% of Lindsay Heights residents are homeowners.
Urban agriculture has been at the heart of what Walnut Way and Lindsay Heights have accomplished during the past 20 years. There is still a long row to hoe in Lindsay Heights, but the soil has been well prepared, and some seeds have taken root and are thriving. Walnut Way has taken a soft approach to a neighborhood that has endured more than its share of hard knocks. “We’ve had this deep conversation about urban ag because that’s where it all started,” Butts says. “That’s the heart of it. That’s the flagship of our social enterprise.”
