It’s now been more than two years since the State Street bridge over the Milwaukee River has been under construction. And the roughly 120-foot span still has a ways to go. It took 4-1/2 years back in the 1930s to complete the 1.7- mile-long Golden Gate Bridge over the shark-infested San Francisco Bay. But this is 2007 and we’re only talking about 120 feet over a smelly, tire-infested river! Had the city of Milwaukee had been involved in the building of the Golden Gate, people would still be taking a ferry between San Francisco and Sausalito.
It would be one thing if when completed the State Street bridge would be some marvelous tourist attraction or an engineering marvel, but it’s just your everyday, garden-variety bascule bridge that occasionally goes up and down. With such bungling on the part of the city, can anyone be surprised that the Park East Corridor will remain one big surface parking lot for years to come, or that a prime piece of real estate directly across from the convention center and owned by the city of Milwaukee has remained a blighted surface parking lot for more than 25 years, or that $91 million in federal transit money has been sitting for 10 years because the city can’t develop a consensus on what should be done with it?
Welcome to Milwaukee, city of lost opportunities.
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