MKE Streetcar: Notable Buildings

Edited by John December / Updated: 2024-06-13 / More Info: johndecember.com/mke

These are buildings near^* The Hop Streetcar's Main Line (first table) and then The Hop Streetcar's Lakefront Line (second table) that are over 30 meters tall^**.

Since the Main and Lakefront Lines have shared stops along Milwaukee St and Broadway, some tall buildings are located on both lines. In these cases, I list the building for its Main Line ranking only. Thus, the Lakefront Line buildings in the second table are near Lakefront-Line only stops (the Lakefront "Loop," that is the portion of the Lakefront Line that is different from the Main Line).

Tall buildings are not the only component of a healthy urban landscape, but when placed and designed well, tall buildings do triple duty by: (1) making the best environmental use of scarce urban land, (2) powering economic activity and compact, walkable urbanism, particularly when paired with transit-oriented development, and (3) generating revenue supportive of the entire city. Tall buildings reflect land value and provide benefits by translating that land value into residences, offices, commercial activities, retail, destinations, and jobs. Tall buildings can be an environmentally sound component of city development. (See: my essay regarding tall buildings and development along the route.)

Please note that these are just the buildings along the streetcar line. A city-wide listing shows additional tall buildings throughout the city. Milwaukee is home to the tallest buildings in the State of Wisconsin. Madison's tallest building is the Wisconsin State Capitol at 284 feet (86 meters), completed 1917. Green Bay's tallest building is the Bellin Building at 98 feet (30 meters), completed 1915.

In the listing, I provide a numerical rank for buildings over 200 feet (60 meters) tall because I had complete set of data on the heights of those buildings in the emporis.com database (which, unfortunately, has been discontinued). Buildings under 200' (60 m) tall and over 100' (30 m) tall are listed where known, but because I do not have a complete listing of those buildings, I do not include a numerical ranking.

The heights given are in terms of architectural height. The heights shown are rounded to the nearest foot and tenth of a meter.

The buildings are sorted by tallest to shortest and labeled with a M- or L- prefix for the Main Line or Lakefront Line of The Hop route. The ranking for building city-wide is given by the C- prefix to indicate the City Rank. The link on the name of the building takes you to official information or a Web page about the building.

Footnotes

^* About 1 or 2 blocks away from a stop, and perhaps just a bit more for a few important destinations. I'm using the distance of about 400 meters for how far the site can be from a streetcar stop. This would be about a 5-minute walk. This corresponds to a commonly-used distance to define the "walk shed" for transit (see for example Ped Shed: walkable urban design and sustainable placemaking and Introduction to the MBTA Walksheds Atlas ).

^** Data Sources: structurae.net, emporis.com database (which was discontinued), skyscraperpage.com, Wikipedia.org, HighRises.com, skyscrapercenter.com, SkyDB, Urban Milwaukee, local media, and observations along the route.