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A little more than a decade ago I was able to cross a place off my bucket list when I got a tour of the old Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Church (which later became Ascension Lutheran) building in Walker’s Point that had also been home to the Maronn Candy Company, makers of the sus-sounding CheeSweet candy, a mix of chocolate and cheese.
At the time, the 1882 building – in the shadow of the Allen-Bradley/Rockwell Automation clocktower – was vacant, crumbling and recently purchased by local contractor Eric Barthenheier, who planned to renovate it.
Recently, I got a chance to go back and see how the place, 202 W. Scott St., has changed in the intervening years.
And, it HAS changed. A lot.
Here’s where I suggest you click on the original story to get the full background, as well as photos of how the building looked on the inside and outside in 2014.
But the quick version is that the building was designed by parishioner and architect Andrew Elleson and built to replace an earlier wood frame church that the congregation built in 1853.
After the church built a new home on Layton Boulevard in 1923 – which still houses the original congregation, long ago renamed Ascension Lutheran Church – the Maronn Candy Co. moved in and altered the interior to suit its needs for making its products, including the heralded (but not-tasty-sounding) CheeSweet.
At this juncture I’ll add that my great-great-grandfather, who emigrated from Germany in 1877, worked in this building as a janitor, and his daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, worked at Maronn when it was there.
So, I’ve always been interested in this little cream city brick place.
By the time I got to see inside, it had long been owned by bottling equipment maker Federal Manufacturing, which used it for storage.
The inside was bad, as you can see from the images in my previous story.
Not anymore.
Northern Ground, a digital development studio that designs and builds websites and apps, now owns and occupies the building, and co-founder Ryan Janecek showed me around.
The place has been transformed.
“Eric got pretty far,” Janecek says of Barthenheier as we stand in the lobby addition facing the alley. “He didn't really do anything in the basement. He put this garage on and used it for his work trucks and he had a little workshop out here. Upstairs was kind of like his bachelor pad.”
Northern Ground, which had its offices in the Blatz complex Downtown, was looking for a new place and bought the building in 2020.
“Because we're expert commercial real estate investors, Bobby, we bought it right before the pandemic,” Janecek says with a laugh. “We looked at it right after Thanksgiving 2019 and then we made an offer. So genius.
“The Blatz is a really cool penthouse space, but we just rented. Eventually we were like, “do we have the money? We're sick of paying for parking and making landlords rich. Can we find something?' It's really hard to find a small one, we're only 12 people.”
When the pandemic hit, Northern Ground had the building under contract.
“We sent everybody home and then we sort of renegotiated with Eric,” Janecek remembers. “We needed to do a build-out and we had him bid on it, along with a bunch of other people, and it turned out like, ’Hey, you know the building, do you want to finish it for us?’
“So we negotiated the purchase price and the build-out. I think he was happy to have a guaranteed year of work for his guys during a pandemic, he gave us a little relief on the price and we made it all work.”
That Barthenheier’s shop is located perhaps 30 feet from the back (now front, since the entrance shifted to the alley-facing addition) of the building didn’t hurt, either.
“Every morning they walked over, and it worked out good for everybody,” says Janecek, who says that whenever he needs some work done, he pops over to see Barthenheier across the alley.
From the door of his shop, Barthenheier can see his former building’s new glass and steel entrance – with a deck on top – built atop the old slab behind the church.
Inside the bright lobby, adorned with lots of greenery, you can step down a few stairs into the basement, which has a garage door that allows vehicles to pull inside, though it’s really mostly used for gatherings and meetings.
Down here the old wood support columns still hold up the astonishingly big horizontal beams, which are likely 12x12 or 14x14, each hewn from a single tree and connected with scarf joints.
In one corner is the door for the old freight elevator installed by Maronn in the 1920s.
Janecek says he likes the idea of re-opening the doors facing 2nd Street and using the elevator as a tiny coffee shop. When I suggest the Morning Lift, he promises me credit if they use the name for this idea, which is still only that: an idea.
Nearby is a small office that Northern Ground rents to Sea Dog, a video business and frequent collaborator.
On the next level up are offices and a little glass enclosure around the original Scott Street entrance, where the mail carrier still drops mail sometimes, despite the fact that for a number of years now, the building’s main entrance has been around back and the address changed to 1127 S. 2nd St.
The place is full of great movie and music posters – Joy Division, Juliet Binoche films, Audrey Hepburn, a poster for Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols’ movie, “The Filth and the Fury.”
It’s a massive upgrade from when Barthenheier showed me around the first time and we had to be careful not to fall through holes in the floor as we made our way around decades of bottling company trash that was stacked everywhere.
But things get even better the higher you go here now – which I guess makes sense for a building that’s home to a company called Northern Ground – and the top floor is a revelation.
Climbing a modern staircase you enter into the double-height, peaked ceiling former church sanctuary.
It’s still a big open space, but likely brighter than ever, with a meeting area to the left, a kitchen and eating area on the far end, beneath the trefoil-adorned arch, which is pretty much the only interior decorative architectural element that survived the candy and bottling years.
In front of you, when you’re standing at the top of the stairs, is a lofted space with a seating area that narrows and runs along much of the west wall, which has a couple rows of narrow shelves that hold art books.
Underneath the loft is another, snug-like seating area and through a door on the north wall, the exterior deck, with its firepit, grill and seating.
Standing out here, Janecek – who did the design work himself with Barthenheier – says Northern Ground uses it to host Pride parade-watching parties and other gatherings. (They also have lots of parties inside, including a big Halloween bash.)
“Who has a more Milwaukee view,” Janecek says with a laugh. “We’ve got the Hoan Bridge, a Gruber billboard, and the clocktower. You get the smell from Jones Island. It's a full 4D experience.”
Janecek says that the Northern Ground team likes coming to the office, and you can see why.
“People can set their own schedules, but I would say overall we're in the office,” he says. “We sent everybody home (in 2020) and it worked out really well. (At) the Blatz (we rode) an elevator and it was super busy and at the time it felt sort of covid-y in a weird way.
“By the time we came back to the office a year later we got to invite everybody back to this place. It was somewhere new and a turn the page kind of thing.”
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. A fifth collects Urban Spelunking articles about breweries and maltsters.
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 been heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
