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Recently – seven years since The Domes were briefly closed after a piece of concrete fell from the interior of one of the structures – a survey seeking public comment on the future of the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory was released.
The survey follows previous efforts, including a $66 million plan to rehabilitate the Domes and Mitchell Park in 2019, that did not come to fruition.
As Milwaukee awaits the recommendations that will be based not only on the results of that survey, but also comments gathered at public meetings as far back as 2016, as well as cost-analysis data for a number of options, including renovation and demolition, compiled by an outside consulting firm, I went over for a behind the scenes tour.
This kind of tour is something I’ve done before but that was three years before that piece of concrete closed the Domes and re-ignited the long discussion about the future of this Milwaukee landmark.
This time, I wanted to see close-up, for myself, some of the issues facing the structure.
Before I go any further, despite its issues, the Domes are safe for visitors.
As I wrote in the previous article, the Domes – designed by architect Donald Grieb, were constructed in stages in the 1960s.
They replaced a long-lived "crystal palace" style conservatory designed by Henry C. Koch (City Hall, Turner Hall, Golda Meir School, The Pfister Hotel, etc.) that stood on the site for many years.
The Show Dome was erected first, opening in December 1964, four years after the Climatron dome, a similar structure, opened at Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.
The Tropical Dome followed in February 1966 and in November 1967, the trio was complete when the Arid Dome opened. Since then, the Domes have become an integral part of Milwaukee’s image, both at home and beyond.
In 2013, I wrote that despite their obvious landmark status here, by the 1980s, the Domes were in trouble.
That’s only gotten worse.
As specialists from Super Sky glass contractors in Mequon tested 14 new panels and frames installed as part of a test in the Arid Dome, I sat down with Deputy Director of Milwaukee County Parks Jim Tarantino to talk about the challenges facing the Domes.
One of the biggest is that it is part of the County Parks department of a seriously cash-strapped county government.
“There's been a lot of discussion about the parks department, lack of funding, cutting of resources, 1,000 fewer park workers in the last 30 years,” says Tarantino, “and so many people don't connect those two conversations.
“That parks department that needs to triple its workforce and budget, and that parks department with half a billion dollars in deferred maintenance is the same group of people who are maintaining this facility and are expected to accommodate this within that budget.”
One very enlightening example: the parks have four carpenters on staff. That’s not four carpenters for the Domes, but four carpenters for the Domes and the 450 total buildings and more than 150 parks in the system.
They, along with five electricians and five plumbers, work days, nights and weekends to fix things. And while the Domes has an office for its boiler mechanic, that mechanic is responsible for maintaining about 50 other county facilities, too.
And they work hard.
Tarantino walks me through the Domes and he points out broken panes of glass, exposed rebar due to failing concrete, mortar joints that have vanished and into which you can stick your entire hand, and more.
Walking into the Show Dome, the first thing one notices is the netting, which cost half a million dollars to install in all three domes.
This was installed when the facility closed after that piece of concrete fell in 2016. If you get up close to it – as we do in the Tropical Dome – you can see broken glass and pieces of concrete caught at the bottom.
“So, it’s working,” says Tarantino. “But you see that chunk of glass? That means that chunk of glass is missing from somewhere above us.”
And that’s why the “sneeze guards” have also been installed in the Domes. Maybe you haven’t noticed them, but once you see them you can’t unsee them.
They are sheets of rigid plastic installed along the outer edges of the Domes, where the glass panes meet the foundation wall. They are there to catch the water that comes in when it rains.
“We get rain in the domes,” Domes horticulturalist Michelle Pinnola tells me.
“Rain on rainy days is nice, though, I will say that,” she adds, focusing on the rain clouds’ silver lining. “It takes off the watering load a little bit (laughs).”
The water that falls into the Domes when it rains is only part of the H2O-induced problems. More fundamental is the very design of the structures.
Each aluminum piece of framing you see around the thousands of panes of glass was designed to be a rain gutter, funneling water down through hubs to drains that run around the bases of the Domes and ultimately into a giant concrete tank in the basement.
This reserve was meant to be used to water the plants.
However, it didn’t take long for the narrow little gutters to become clogged, especially in the 1960s and ‘70s when the adjacent Menomonee Valley was still a locus of industrial activity, and there was no effective system for clearing them.
What happens when gutters are clogged? The water finds a new route back to the ground, and rarely a route that’s good for a building.
And, so, all around the Domes we can see the effects of the water damage, from that failing mortar, to rusty metal roofing and other parts, and, perhaps worst of all, the damage to the concrete structure of the Domes.
Ironically, the one effort made to make the facility sustainable – which was not something architects and builders were thinking much about in the early 1960s – proved ill-designed and potentially deadly for the structure.
“There's the perception that it's a futuristic type structure and that also because it’s made of glass, it must be a greenhouse that's good for growing plants in,” says Tarantino. “And if it's a futuristic type structure, there must have been some sort of forethought in terms of sustainability.
“Both are totally untrue. It's the most inefficient building that the county has in terms of energy that just gets produced and blown out through the top of the Domes or through the cracks in the glass. It's all single-pane glass.”
Worse still? It’s a bad place to grow plants, he adds.
“There's radiators all around the perimeter, which makes these zones within each dome,” Tarantino explains. “You can have a 10-degree difference in temperature just within an area of the dome because of the way it was designed.”
Poor temperature regulation is one of the biggest challenges in the Domes, says Pinnola, who adds varying soil conditions created by changes across the decades and the lack of an irrigation system to the list, too.
The openings at the tops of the Domes – where fans serve to ventilate the structures – are also problematic, as Tarantino noted.
The county spends about a quarter-million dollars annually on energy bills.
“We need to be more up front about sustainability. I mean look at outside today (The day we met, wildfire smoke-filled skies were deemed to be hazardous, according to the EPA. -ed.). Does anything put in better perspective what's urgent and important about climate change?
“We have to weigh all these things about the future of the Domes, about how important is it to Milwaukee and to future generations. There's the existential question of can we continue to just be pumping CO2 out there with a clean conscience?”
But so far we’ve only really discussed the part of the facility that the public gets to see. Underneath and behind the Domes there are greenhouses, a boiler room, storage areas and more.
“There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes here,” says Tarantino. “If the front of the house is showing some maintenance needs and cracks, you can imagine how bad the back of the house is, because we tend to try to keep up the visitor experience here first, obviously.
“It's getting to a point where we can't keep this place going on duct tape and the constant effort of our maintenance staff.”
Tarantino takes me down to the boiler room and after I scurry up a metal ladder to peek into that rainwater collection tank, we turn our attention to the four huge boilers.
“The boilers are original to this facility,” says Tarantino. “Most people say look like they came off the Titanic.”
Often, only one of the boilers is working while the other three are in need of repair. Parts typically have to be found on Craigslist or Ebay for these boilers.
A lot of equipment down here, frankly, looks well past its prime.
“If they all go out, all the plants in the Domes die,” Tarantino says, bluntly, before pointing out a control panel that isn’t as vintage, but is equally outmoded.
“The only way we get replacement parts for this is when we replace similar systems in other parks buildings,” he says. “We save all those components.”
Stepping into the greenhouses that were built out back about a decade ago to replace county greenhouses that were cleared for Zoo Interchange work, the difference between a modern facility and a nearly 60-year-old one is immediately obvious.
Here, the greenhouses have irrigation systems, modern HVAC, protective screens that are automated, and other features.
“The temperatures are easier to regulate in here,” says Pinnola. “The conditions are very strange (in the Domes). Horticulture's a rapidly changing industry and so there's constantly being developments made in how we can grow things efficiently, more green, more sustainably.
“To have a newer facility, we would be able to add those things more easily. People say ‘save the Domes’ but I think there are challenges that come with working in an old building, and that's not really considered as much, because it's such an iconic structure.”
One of these greenhouses is used as an event space that’s rented for weddings and other celebrations, with Zilli Hospitality Group handling the catering. The income from these events are incredibly important in keeping the Domes alive at this point.
“Throughout the years – and a lot of the hand-wringing around how do we save the Domes has been going on for much longer than people realize,” says Tarantino, “it's been going on since the '80s – there have been a lot of pushes to do more, market more, do more programming, do more events, diversify revenue.
“The long of the short of it is we've done all that. We've chased down every dollar that we can. We've brought in a food and beverage partner to run that side of things, and we have generated more revenue, and attendance this year has been really great. We've expanded our partnership with the friends group here so that field trips are through the roof and despite all that, there's no way to really balance the annual budget in a way that this place makes a profit.
“It's not designed as that. It's a public service. This is not something that the private sector would provide. It's a public institution, and public dollars support this shared asset. We have looked at raising admissions to try to level out the annual operating budget. There's no real way to do it.”
That’s just the operations side. To repair or rebuild the Domes or to replace the Domes with a new facility – that’s all money that would have to come from the Milwaukee County capital budget.
That’s the same budget that buys MCTS buses and funds mental health care and runs the courthouse and correctional facilities and paves the pathways in the parks, and on and on.
Did you know that every one of the thousands of panes of glass at the Domes were hand-cut on-site during construction? No two panes are exactly the same. Next time you’re there, glance up and you’ll notice the vertical lines running from ground to peak aren’t straight in most cases. That’s because every pane is different.
That, one of the Super Sky techs tells me, means each replacement pane – which would of course be of higher quality glass today – would still have to all be custom cut, after a 3-D scan of the entire structure to determine the specific dimensions of each existing piece.
Can it be done? Of course. Can we save The Domes and repair the many problems? Pretty much anything can be done these days. It just takes time and money.
Does the County have the money? Do taxpayers want to foot the bill?
Last week, the County Board approved a .4 percent sales tax increase that should ease some of the strain on the County budget, but not all of it and the board will still be in the position of prioritizing its resources.
Would a private entity be willing to take over the facility? Even if there were one willing, should that happen?
I ask Tarantino what, in a perfect world, he would like to see happen in Mitchell Park, and as he more succinctly and enthusiastically tells my colleague Courtney Bondar later in the visit, “it’s not my decision.”
In a more nuanced way, he explains, “I think we need to think in terms of short-, medium- and long-term goals because this really is a generational decision. Right now I'm thinking about the short-term and that is to build some consensus around a path, because there's been too many paths, too many ways that this could go.
“We're trying to get as much data and information as we can so that we can move off of the emotional and focus on what really makes the most sense for Milwaukeeans.”
There are many options, he says. Are all the Domes saved and renovated? Is just one Dome kept as part of a new facility? Do we build an entirely new facility?
“There's been disagreement over the years between (county) executive and board and (parks) department and the public, and there hasn't been a sense of consensus,” Tarantino says. “What's most important is to get people pointed in the same direction and then work on what that future option looks like.
“I've been involved with this in various capacities for seven years and I've seen consensus around certain things. There just isn't a consensus over how we're going to pay for this big $60 million question.”
The County understands the urgency of the situation and is gathering data and public comment so that it can make a decision on the Domes.
“There's a lot of consensus that the conservatory should have more of an outdoor component to it," says Tarantino. "There should be something that neighborhood residents can engage with without having to pay admission to get inside. There should always be an option for parents in the winter to have something to do.
“Everyone agrees on that. So I think if you take all those areas where there's a high level of consensus and put it together, it really starts to form that vision for what most everyone can agree on to do here.”
Learn more, follow the ongoing story and share your feedback at The Future of Mitchell Park website.
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.
