Milwaukee County Courthouse

About this property

The Milwaukee County Courthouse is a high-rise municipal building located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Completed in 1931, it is the third county courthouse to be built in the city and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The first two courthouses were built at what is now Cathedral Square Park on the east side of the Milwaukee River. Situated on the crown of a hill, the eleven-story courthouse is 174 feet (54m) tall. The neoclassical style building was designed by New York architect Albert Randolph Ross, with the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, chosen by a jury over 32 other architects from across the nation in a 1927 design competition. The building was clad in Bedford limestone and embellished with Beaux-Arts influenced details and sculpture such as owls and lion heads. The masonry work was provided by Andres Stone and Marble Company, owner Edgar Andres, whose family also helped construct the library and a local bank which is now the home for the Milwaukee Historical Society. The NRHP nomination states, "the most monumental of all Neoclassical courthouses in the state, the Milwaukee County Courthouse is perhaps the apogee of the Neoclassical movement in twentieth century civic architecture in Wisconsin." While heralded as one of the grandest courthouses in the United States, it was once called a "million dollar rockpile" by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The Milwaukee County Courthouse is part of a greater civic space that includes not only the immediate area, but also the neighboring Milwaukee Public Museum, Central Library, and a swath of government buildings running east along Wells Street to the Milwaukee City Hall. Along the east side of the County Courthouse is a terraced commons area called MacArthur Square. It was dedicated on September 17, 1945, to General Douglas MacArthur, who attended West Division High School - now Milwaukee High School of the Arts. A parking garage was built underneath in 1967, which cuts in to the side of the hill. At the base of the building is the India-America Friendship Park and a statue in memory of Mahatma Gandhi. North 9th Street continues through as a tunnel between the building and parking structure. The MacArthur Square area has been criticized for its uninspired architecture and for noise pollution from the high capacity ventilation of the parking levels beneath it, which overpowers the water feature that was supposed to drown it out. Just to the north is the Milwaukee County Safety Building and Jail buildings. On the southern side of the courthouse is Clas Park, named for local architect and city planner Alfred Clas. The Kilbourn Tunnel, a connecting corridor to and from northbound I-43 at the Courthouse Annex on the west side of the building to Kilbourn Avenue (named for the founder of the Kilbourntown portion of Milwaukee, Byron Kilbourn), runs underneath the courthouse and surrounding civic area.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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