Park East: Good for a few laughs

Normally, I’m not a told-you-so guy, but this one is too good to pass up. While the media and all of elected officialdom were running around crowing about Robert Ruvin’s big plans for the Park East, including an office building to house the advertising firm of Cramer-Krasselt (C-K), I was telling anyone who would listen (or wouldn’t listen), including a couple people from C-K, that Ruvin’s plans were as fleeting as all his hot air. Well, the story finally came out the other day that C-K is pulling out of the development because, well, they apparently finally also realized that there is no development, which doesn’t say much for the management of C-K that it took this long to reach that conclusion. C-K has to be out of its present digs by the fall of 2008.

Here’s a guy, Rob Ruvin, whose only development experience was converting a few apartments to condos in the Blatz building, all of a sudden putting up a 30-story opulent tower and a 10-story office building (to house C-K) in the Park East. What really convinced me that this guy was a joke was a meeting I attended where Ruvin talked about his plans. His whole presentation was about a building in Dallas that he wanted to duplicate here in Milwaukee. No one but me questioned him about the fact that everything he showed was of the building in Dallas. He had no drawings of his Milwaukee tower, yet he said he would be breaking ground soon. How soon, I asked. He wasn’t really sure. Never mind that I don't believe he even owned the land – and still doesn’t –where his developments were going to be built. I then went to the Web sites of all the nationally and internationally-known architects, hoteliers, and developers he said he was partnering with and not one mentioned anything about Milwaukee or Ruvin. Yet ground breaking was imminent. But the media (which could have gone to these Web site as well, but apparently didn’t think to do so) and everyone else kept lapping up everything he was peddling.

So Ruvin’s house of cards is crumbling. My question now is what’s going to happen to the "historic" Gipfel brewery that he moved to the proposed site of his 30-story tower in the Park East? How many years do you think that eyesore will sit propped up on pilings next to the even bigger eyesore, the former Sydney Hih building that also was going to be incorporated into the tower project?