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In mid-May, Illinois-based Superior Air-Ground Ambulance Service, which has been making in-roads in Wisconsin since around 2018, opened a new station in Downtown Milwaukee.
The facility, which also has a Life Support Training Institute (LSTI) classroom, occupies what many will remember as the Badger Bus Depot at 635 N. James Lovell St.
In addition to providing ambulance service in Milwaukee County, Superior’s facility is also being used to train EMTs, who get stipends during training, and after they complete state testing and certification, they’ll get jobs at Superior.
This kind of on-the-job training is key not only for Milwaukeeans seeking to get a rewarding and good-paying job, it also helps fill gaps in staffing at EMS agencies around the state, nearly half of which have reported staffing problems.
“Superior Ambulance has more than two decades of experience training EMS workers, and we’re proud to step up and offer new opportunities for EMS providers of all license levels,” says Joe Posey, Superior Ambulance’s general manager for Wisconsin, who moved his family from Detroit to take on this role.
“The James Lovell Milwaukee Station will expand the region’s skilled workforce and ensure high-quality care across southeast Wisconsin.”
At the moment, Superior is actively recruiting for more than 50 paramedic and 75 EMT positions in the area, and the schooling for those new recruits will take place in a classroom located above a space that was long familiar to Milwaukee-area UW-Madison students.
Badger Bus, which now has a stop at the Intermodal Station on St. Paul Avenue, sold tickets and had its waiting room on the first floor for decades. There, generations of students would catch the bus back to school after being home.
Badger Bus began when Herman E. Meier launched a bus service between Madison and Monroe in 1920 with a single 15-passenger vehicle. In 1927, he incorporated as the Southern Wisconsin Transportation Company and began expanding.
During the Depression, according to a Badger Bus social media post, the company was running Hudson Sedans down to Freeport, Illinois.
In 1946, the company, by then known as Badger Bus (and Badger Coaches) added a route to Milwaukee via U.S. 30.
Initially, the Milwaukee depot was at 631 N. 6th St., between Michigan and Wisconsin, which would’ve provided a convenient connection with the Interurban North Shore Line that ran between Chicago and Milwaukee and also had its station just a block south on 6th Street.
In 1954, Badger moved its operations a block west to 635 N. 7th St., where it converted a 1920s commercial building designed by Herbert Tullgren into its new depot.
Frequent newspaper mentions of bus trips to a variety of locations – but especially to Madison – suggest the service was a popular one – and not only with college students – and by 1966, the Badger Bus terminal manager told a reporter that, “by 1969 we plan to start work on a new terminal.”
And that was exactly what happened.
The company hired Birch-Grisa-Phillips which had offices on 174th and Hampton in Butler to design a new facility that would have 7,500 square feet on the first floor and 1,200 square feet of space on a mezzanine.
Birch-Grisa-Phillips was a firm comprising architects Donald J. Phillips and John R. Birch, along with engineer Frank L. Grisa, which appears to have begun as Birch & Grisa, with Phillips joining in the early 1960s.
John Richard Birch was born in Milwaukee on Nov. 25, 1922 and served as a B-29 pilot over the Pacific during World War II, earning the Air Medal, Purple Heart and other honors.
Returning home, he attended Iowa State University, from which he graduated in 1947 in civil engineering. After working in Elkhorn, Whitewater and Beaver Dam, he joined forces with Frank Grisa (born around 1926) in 1962, designing buildings, managing construction projects and doing land planning work in Wisconsin and 12 other states over the course of his career.
Don Phillips joined the firm sometime between 1964 and ‘69 and after Birch and Grisa retired in the mid-1980s, the business – by then headquartered in Brookfield – was renamed Phillips and Associates.
A 1984 AIA Wisconsin directory listing notes that in those days about 25 percent of the firm’s business was industrial facilities and 15 percent was apartments/condominiums. Small scale office buildings, retail shopping centers and planning work each accounted for another 10 percent, with the remaining 30 percent being restaurants, large scale office buildings, banks, medical buildings, municipal buildings and restoration/renovation.
Among its then-recent projects were L’Hermitage condos at Juneau and Jackson, Reliable Paper Company and Basco Credit Union in Wauwatosa, and the Liberty Hill Building in Brookfield.
Interestingly, their Badger Bus Depot doesn’t really fit into any of those categories.
But it was a modernist sort of reverse mullet: all business (a utilitarian block-built bus shed) in the back and the party – in the form of a more decorative facade – out front.
The section of the building facing the sidewalk has two stories.
And it seems to have looked then pretty much as it looks now: with a face brick facade, “striped” with recessed vertical lines between which are five windows up and five windows down on the 7th Street facade, and four windows on each floor facing south.
The entrance is recessed at the southeast corner.
The first floor had an L-shaped ticket counter along the west wall, across from the main entrance, with the majority of the floor taken up with a waiting room that included a row of lockers.
Along the north end were restrooms and in the northeast corner, a small office, though it seems this “office” might have actually been a janitor’s closet.
Jutting out west from this part of the building was a five-bay bus storage area.
Up on the mezzanine, accessed by a staircase out in the bus area that led up to a narrow hallway, was an office on the south end and storage and bathrooms up at the north end, with a drivers’ room in between.
Megal Construction, based on 126th and Lisbon, was hired to build it at an estimated cost of $58,000.
A building permit was issued on June 12, 1969 and an inspector visited the next day to find no work had yet begun.
However, by the day the site was officially approved on June 26, the front of the earlier building had been demolished. By July 18, some walls had gone up and so had some steel columns at the front of the site.
A month later, the office portion of the building had its roof and in the following days the terrazzo floor was poured and the bathroom walls were in place.
On Sept. 9 the inspector declared the ticket office and driver lounge area were complete and work had begun to tear down the remainder of the old building so that work could commence on the bus garage.
By Jan. 9, 1970 the project was “nearing completion” and six days later, Building Inspector C. P. Brown declared the building “complete and approved.”
And so the buses began to roll in and out.
By the mid-1980s, Towne Realty had its eye on the Greyhound station across the street and the real estate company’s Mike Mervis suggested that Towne would even be willing to buy the Milwaukee Greyhound franchise if that’s what it took to move forward with its purchase of the building.
Towne suggested, not wrongly, that a central transit facility (an idea that had arisen in the past) bringing together all bus and rail services in one area was a good idea and that the Amtrak station on St. Paul Avenue seemed like a natural site.
Badger and Trailways bus officials expressed interest in the idea.
And, that’s just what happened.
The Amtrak station was remodeled into the Intermodal Station and all of the bus services made that a passenger hub.
In 2016, Badger Bus – still run by the Meier family – moved its offices and maintenance shops to a building it bought at 6819 S. Howell Ave., though it maintains the Intermodal Station as a stop.
The old depot was sold to Rauch and Romanshek James Lovell LLC for $550,000. Robert Rauch was president of Paratech Ambulance, which occupied the facility until recently and now that use continues now under Superior.
David and Blanche Hill, founded the Superior in 1959, creating the first emergency ambulance service in DuPage County, Illinois.
"We ran the business,” says their son David B. Hill III. “My folks started it as a part-time business before there was any kind of Medicare, Medicaid or healthcare insurance. My dad would still work another job full-time.”
Like Badger Bus, Superior is a company that started as a family business and is still run by the same family. The younger Hill bought the company from his parents in 1981 and has been president ever since.
“I worked my way through college at UIC in downtown Chicago, in political science,” he recalls, “and they just said, ‘Hey, we're going to retire. This opportunity is here now, but it’s not going to be here in six months.
“What I realized is I was lucky because I had an opportunity, especially going to UIC, it's like I might be the only one in this class with an opportunity. We had six ambulances, 20 employees. I've been building it up and having fun doing a lot of cool stuff since then.”
One of those cool things was starting the training classes in Lawndale, Illinois, in 1998.
“We wanted to have an employee population that was reflective of the population we served,” says Hill. “So we started doing that, and the education that we do here (in Milwaukee) is a continuation of what we started 26, 27 years ago.”
Superior plans to expand its operations and its training program in another former Paratech facility at 33rd and Capitol.
While that facility is being set up, Hill was in town recently to celebrate National EMS Week and he invited Mayor Cavalier Johnson (and me!) over for a little cookout and tour of the facility.
It was not Johnson’s first time in the building. Not by a long-shot.
“When I was a student in Madison I rode the bus from Milwaukee to Madison, back and forth, so I spent a lot of time in this place,” he says. “I haven't been here since, so it's really, really incredible to see. The opportunities you guys have here are really, really incredible.
“We're having conversations about making sure that more young people, particularly in Milwaukee, have the opportunity to do what it is you’re doing. To serve the community in the way that you guys are. All of this is public service, whether you're in the mayor's office or whether you're helping people who need critical care, it's all part of public service.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
