It’s been more than 50 years since the former Schuster’s and Gimbel’s Department store building at Garfield Avenue and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Milwaukee has been open to the public, but in just a few months the one-time neighborhood mainstay will once again become a gathering space.
A collaboration between
Royal Capital Group, the
Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and the
Medical College of Wisconsin, the
ThriveOn King project has been in the works for the better part of six years. As renovations wrap on the commercial side of the 470,000-square-foot redevelopment, representatives say they expect the public-facing spaces, including a 20,000-square-foot gathering area and café on the first floor, will open in May.
The GMF, and MCW will begin moving their staff into the building in March, said
Ken Robertson, executive vice president, chief operating officer & chief financial officer at GMF. GMF is moving its 70 employees from its former headquarters in Schlitz Park and will occupy the entire 26,000-square-foot fourth floor of ThriveOn King. MCW will utilize the entirety of the second and third floors – about 52,000 square feet – maintaining offices for 159 employees on a permanent basis, and another 135 employees on a temporary basis. GMF will also have public meeting rooms that nonprofits will be able to utilize on the fourth floor, expanding upon a practice it has long had at its Schlitz Park location.
Organizations on the first floor –
Malaika Early Learning Center, which will be operating a 14,000-square-foot childcare center on the Garfield Avenue facing portion of the building,
Versiti, which will occupy a 3,500 square foot space, and
JobsWork MKE, which is relocating to a 3,600-square-foot space at ThriveOn – will likely start moving in towards the end of April and beginning of May, Robertson said.
In addition, 90 mixed-income apartments being constructed inside the 1917 portion of the former department store are slated to open in late December, said
Kevin Newell, president and chief executive officer of Milwaukee-based development firm Royal Capital Group.
The renovation project was designed by Engberg Andersen Architects, and is being constructed by CG Schmidt and JCP Construction.
Taking shape
On a recent afternoon, some of the first-floor spaces were beginning to take shape on the main floor of the former department store. A broad room where shoppers once stood in line to purchase items, or get their picture taken in the photo studio, is now outfitted with brand-new drywall as the space is carefully divided to accommodate its new purposes.
In the back, where Malaika’s second childcare location will soon be located, brand new changing tables and other nursery items waited patiently under plastic sheeting to protect them from construction dust.
Nearby, an interior wall cutout indicated where Versiti will hold its training program. The nonprofit, formerly known as the Wisconsin Blood Center, plans to operate a community resource and permanent blood donation center at ThriveOn. As part of the effort, its phlebotomist training area will be on view for would-be job seekers.
“Another benefit to having this visible is also reducing the fear and stigma about blood, organ, and tissue donation in communities of color. So, this is why it's very intentionally visible,” said
Cydney Key. As the senior director for ThriveOn guest experience and strategic partnerships at GMF, Key will work on the main floor of the campus to assist partners and members of the public.
Walking around that space last week she pointed to other areas that will serve the neighborhood, like a future wellness lab.
“We'll be programming the space with community partners. So sometimes it might be yoga, it might be meditation, it might be life skills training. There's definitely an intentional focus on youth because that was something the community said they needed during visioning sessions,” Key said. “There's nowhere in the community where they can just focus on their wellness and de-stress. And so, there is proximity to Howard Fuller (Collegiate Academy), which wanted to have that space, but there will also be some intergenerational opportunities as well.”
Helping to foster that kind of community-focused reuse of the former department store has been especially rewarding for Key. Looking at the floor-to-ceiling window displays along Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive and Garfield Avenue, she talked about the paintings and other art installations that are being commissioned for the display spaces – spaces that once showcased clothes and had up until recently been covered up and hidden from the neighborhood’s view.
“Any audience that we go to, people will say, ‘oh, I got my first heels from (Schuster’s), or I remember shopping there with my mom during the holidays,’” Key said. “I just did a presentation about three weeks ago, and an audience member shared that when they were kids they would get dropped off on the mezzanine area near where (Malaika will be located). It's just really cool to hear.”
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Community impact
A $120 million investment, the ThriveOn Collaborative began as a shared effort by GMF, MCW, and Royal Capital to make a place-based investment designed to not only catalyze future development in the King Drive area near downtown, but still economically struggling, neighborhoods of Brewers Hill, Halyard Park and Harambee, while also striving to improve what the nonprofits call social determinants of health – things like social cohesion, access to healthy food, quality affordable housing, economic opportunity, and early childhood education.
So far, the project has helped spur developments like Pete’s Fruit Market which opened at 2323 N. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive in 2018, providing access to fresh fruits and vegetables and other groceries in the former food desert, and the Dohmen Company Foundation’s Food for Health programming, which is run out of the foundation’s 34,000-square-foot building at 2007 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy’s new high school, which is under construction across the street from ThriveOn at 2212 N. Vel Phillips Ave., is slated to welcome students this fall. Royal Capital is the developer of that project as well.
And GMF and MCW are both eager to see how their work in the community can help to further that growth.
For Robertson just having the GMF headquartered in the community is important.
“While we're not far from this location currently, there's something to be said for a community foundation that's actually in the community – for the community to actually inform how we do the work, and to not just be reading about what's happening but experiencing it,” Robertson said. “We’re really excited about what that means to the future of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and how we actually do our overall work day-to-day.”
For MCW, which will be dedicating space at the ThriveOn campus to nine different programs – Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin, Center for AIDS Intervention Research (CAIR), the Institute for Health & Equity (Epidemiology), Community Engagement, Cancer Center Outreach, the Comprehensive Injury Center, Center for Advancing Population Science (CAPS), the Maternal Health Research Center of Excellence, and the Health Equity Scholarship Program – having a homebase in the city's Bronzeville district is expected to benefit the community-focused health programs by putting them closer to the populations they seek to serve.
Researchers working for CAPS, which focuses on chronic health issues, like diabetes, should hopefully gain greater insight into how to address the disease if they are actually working in the community, said
Greg Wesley, one of the co-chairs of the ThriveOn Collaboration, and the senior vice president of strategic alliances and business development for MCW.
“Being closer to community allows us to see if we can design intervention opportunities as well,” Wesley said. “It allows us to not just identify the opportunity, but to begin creative intervention work that allows us to have a different conversation about the disparities.”
Wesley added that co-locating the community-focused programs at ThriveOn will also lead to greater opportunities for collaboration between those programs. Some of that collaboration is already taking place with MCW’s Health Equity Academic Committee, which meets on a regular basis so program staff can share information and look for ways to partner. Meanwhile MCW medical students enrolled in the Health Equity Scholars Program (HESP)– a four-year health equity training track – should only add to those discussions as they will have the opportunity to be part of a learning community residing in the ThriveOn apartments.
Long Road
Talking about the project last week, Newell, whose company Royal Capital owns the entire ThriveOn campus, said seeing the community spaces on the cusp of opening is heartening, especially when he considers the rough economic waters the project had to weather.
“The vision has definitely developed and grown, and we couldn't be prouder of that, but it also came along with some significant challenges, be it that we were walking right into COVID and then all of the volatility in the financial markets,” Newell said. “So, this is what we call a true labor of love with the number of financial resources and so forth that were needed in order to get this appropriately financed and capitalized.”
The apartment project, which will include affordable housing units for families and people 55 and older, as well as market rate apartments, and units dedicated for medical students in HESP, had financing finalized just last week, marking another milestone for the effort.
“We're excited,” Newell said. “Hopefully this is going to be a demonstration for what collaboration can do inside of this community of ours.”
