St. Paul Avenue, along the Fox River in downtown Waukesha, has been seeing a bit of a renaissance, with long vacant parcels being transformed into new developments.
Then there’s the former Hardee’s building at Northwest Barstow Street and St. Paul Avenue.
Owned by Historic Prairieville LP and managed by affiliate Berg Management Co., the former fast-food restaurant has sat vacant since May 2014, when the eatery was shuttered.
Since then, the building has been plagued by vandalism and an absence of interest from would-be tenants. Despite an ill-fated proposal to transform the property into a future Mad Rooster Café – a bid that fizzled in 2017 after restauranteur Andreas Bouraxis was convicted of tax fraud – the building has only hosted squatters in recent years.
Berg Management’s commercial property manager Rosie Strauss said the company plans to raze the blighted structure and as of late March was waiting on necessary approvals from the state Department of Natural Resources before sending contractors to the site.
Historic Prairieville, which owns the entire 1.4-acre property at 130 Northwest Barstow St. and an adjacent 0.4-acre site, hopes to redevelop the property, Straus said, but can only take the building itself down to its slab at this point.
That’s because the site where the building now sits was long home to a massive fuel tank operated by the Waukesha Gas and Electric Co. The plant was located at the site for decades, with the final building being demolished sometime in the 1970s, according to local historian John Schoenknecht.
