Care center wins national award for transforming 50-year-old brownfield site

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The St. Ann Center celebrated winning a national award for transforming a brownfield 50 to an intergenerational care center on Milwaukee’s northwest side, center officials said on Monday. 

The St. Ann Center for Generational Care won the Phoenix Award for Brownfields Excellence for building the Bucyrus Campus, which excavated and rebuilt 7.5 acres of a former brownfield at 2450 W. North Ave., Milwaukee. The campus received the award as the best project out of thousands developed in Environmental Protection Agency Region 5, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio.  

The Phoenix Awards are given to those who redevelop brownfields across the country from the Brownfields Conference. The last Phoenix Awards ceremony was held in Oklahoma City on Aug. 17.

Before St. Ann’s started building, the North Avenue brownfield sat vacant for more than 50 years after the city razed homes and businesses across two former city blocks, nonprofit officials said. The properties were razed in preparation for a freeway spur that was never built, and the destruction left behind exposed soil contaminated with lead paint, leaking home heating oil tanks and other pollutants. 

The design was created by Zimmerman Architectural Studios and construction crews under Milwaukee-based C.G. Schmidt broke ground in 2014, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reported. 

St. Ann Center used $400,000 in EPA Brownfields Cleanup Grants and Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. grants to excavate and remove more than 3,800 cubic yards of contaminated soil, nonprofit officials said. Crews moved 2,000 more cubic yards of contaminated soil into a new hill and capped it with 3,800 cubic yards of clean imported clay and topsoil. 

The nonprofit bought the land from the city for $1 an acre, officials said. The overall cost of the project was $26 million. 

St. Ann’s planned the project with partner Canada-based Stantec Consulting Services, center officials said. David Holmes, principal at Stantec, said the project was challenging due to its scale, scope and status as a first-time brownfield project for a small nonprofit organization. 

This was only the second Phoenix Award to be given in Milwaukee and the Bucyrus Campus project was “one of the most impactful completed in Milwaukee’s northside neighborhoods,” Holmes said.  

At a celebration event, center and founder president Sister Edna Lonergan said the buildings that once stood over the brownfields were torn down so long ago that most people can no longer remember them, just the vacant site. 

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who lived in the neighborhood as a boy, said, “I knew it as a brownfield. As a child, I walked past it many times.”