Some buildings may need renovation due to a lack of love, but that’s certainly not why the Muellner Building at Hart Park (7300 Chestnut St.) in Wauwatosa is now getting some much-needed attention.
Built in phases (the first phases were in 1938 and 1940) and clad in local stone, it houses the very active Wauwatosa Senior Center and the Wauwatosa Curling Club.
The Muellner Building, named in 1974 for Howard Muellner, who served as the park’s superintendent for the previous 48 years, also has rooms that can (and do) be rented for weddings and other events, making it a busy and well-used building.
“This facility has been here for almost 80 years and is in dire need of renovation,” said David Simpson, Public Works Director for the City of Wauwatosa. “Through partnerships and grant funding, the city is pleased to be able to undertake this $5 million project with approximately 80 percent private funding in addition to grant funding.”
“We’re trying to return the building to its original character. The building had a 1990s look, but as part of this project we’re trying to return the building to its original 1940s character.”
From the outside, work will be done to bring the building back to its original appearance with new windows, doors, tuck points and a more original feel to the main entrance. The current entrance will be remodeled.
Inside, there’s new HVAC and electrical equipment, a new roof, solar panels to help generate electricity for the facility (Simpson said Tosa is now at about 50 percent solar usage in its public buildings), and improvements to the event space and senior center rooms.
Perhaps the most eye-catching change is the return of the curling rink’s large barrel vaulted ceiling. The wooden structure, believed to have been built by Unit Structures of Peshtigo, is now visible in its original form and will remain intact after decades of being covered up. An undated photo of the interior of the rink. (Photo: Wauwatosa Curling Club) X
The $5.2 million cost will be covered by $2 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, $1.5 million raised by the Wauwatosa Curling Club, $500,000 from a hotel/motel tax and the remaining $1.12 million from Wauwatosa’s capital budget.
Because the building is a local historic landmark, the work required approval from the Wauwatosa Historic Preservation Commission.
Kahler Slater is the project’s architect and Duffek Construction is the general contractor.
While the building itself is around 80 years old, the park and curling club have a history even older.
Hart Park and Wauwatosa Curling Club
Hart Park’s origins date back to 1921, when Wauwatosa purchased 19.5 acres along the north bank of the Menomonee River with plans to create a park that was imaginatively named “City Park.”
Over the next five years, an skating rink, tennis courts, athletic fields, and outdoor curling facilities were added to the site, and a field house and football field were built in 1929. WPA at work in City Park, 1934. (Photo: City of Wauwatosa) X WPA project card. (Photo: Wisconsin Historical Society) X
With the onset of the Great Depression and the formation of the Works Progress Administration, activity at the park intensified as the Administration (who called the site Athletic Park) took on numerous projects, including building a stone wall along the river, building a pedestrian bridge over the Menomonee River, and later lighting the tennis courts, building and painting fences, painting light poles, demolishing old buildings and moving an existing greenhouse.
By 1938, as the work progressed, more work was added, including the installation of a sprinkler system on the parkway and “performing incidental and ancillary work.” The original exterior of the Link Building in 1938. (Photo: City of Wauwatosa) X
Later works also included “the construction of a recreational facility and curling rink.”
The first to be completed in 1938 was the Wauwatosa Curling Club’s rink and associated refrigeration facility. The facility, like the park, dates back to 1921, when construction began in a shed (photos suggest that shed doesn’t really describe the building) on Stickney Avenue just south of the current city hall. The Curling Club’s Stickney “shed.” (Photo: City of Wauwatosa) X
The club moved to City Park in 1925.
The new indoor skating rink was the first of its kind in Wisconsin.
This was followed by the construction of a recreational facility, which, like the curling facility, was designed by architect Walter Dorman in cooperation with the Tosa City Department of Urban Engineering.
architect
Born Walter August Dorman in Madison in 1905, he moved to Milwaukee as a child with his German-born parents, where his father and mother worked as a wagon driver and in a department store, respectively, and later owned a grocery store near 27th and Clark Streets.
After studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Dorman worked as a draftsman in the offices of architects George Schley & Sons from 1927 to 1930. He returned to Pennsylvania in 1930 and worked for architect William Macy Stanton in Philadelphia, but returned home to work for Martin Thalgren & Sons from 1931 to 1932.
Three years after joining the Dorman & Strass architectural and engineering firm in 1932, Dorman went out on his own and designed houses in the late 1930s, first in Madison and then primarily in the Wauwatosa area.
But Dorman also did commercial and other buildings, including a YMCA and bank in Wauwatosa and a grocery store and specialty building in Elm Grove.
In the mid-1950s, Dorman’s offices were located at 7616 Harwood Street, now the site of the French restaurant Le Reve, but he soon became a partner with Arthur O. Redman, who was elected president of the Wisconsin AIA chapter in 1956.
Redeman Dorman, whose offices are at 134th Street and Watertown Plank Road in Elm Grove, appears to have eschewed the types of single-family homes Dorman has worked on in the past, choosing instead to focus on churches, banks, industrial buildings and cemetery chapels, including the 1959 Ralph Waldo Emerson School at MPS.
Sadly, this partnership ended with Dorman’s premature death in 1962, aged 57.
Mullnerville
Dorman’s Colonial Revival/Georgian Revival style recreational facility built in Wauwatosa City Park. Renamed in 1960 to honor Wauwatosa founder Charles Hart, it was completed in 1940 and opened in 1941. A postcard view of the finished building. (Photo: City of Wauwatosa) X
This building was designated as a Tosa landmark in 2012.
The Muellner Building also houses Wisconsin’s indoor artificial curling ice facility, with clubrooms and locker rooms in the basement, as well as Hart Park staff offices and the Wauwatosa Senior Center.
The building also has a kitchen and several rooms available for community use: a small Garden Room on the first floor, the Riverview Room on the second floor with its beautiful cathedral ceiling, and the long Tosa Room with its barrel vaulted ceiling (only available April through September; the rest of the year it serves as a curling facility). Two views of the Riverview Rooms. XX
There is also a compact room adjacent to the Firefly Room that can be opened to view the larger adjacent space and serves as a spectator area during curling season.
After suffering flood damage for two consecutive years, the building was renovated and expanded in 1999, which included replacing the light fixtures, re-flooring the curling rink and installing a wheelchair-accessible toilet in the former maintenance shed.
At this time, an addition was constructed and the Senior Center was relocated from City Hall.
Senior Center programs are temporarily relocated to City Hall and other locations while the center is being renovated, but will return to the Muellner Building once construction is complete. The work is expected to be completed by November.
“As part of this project, we will also be welcoming the Curling Club back into the facility,” Simpson said. “They were partners in the original construction of the facility and have been an integral part of the building ever since it was built.”
“We’re really pleased that they’ll be here for the long term. They’ve been a great partner over the years and we’re sure they’ll continue to be that way.”
Former curling club president Kelly Varian said the club’s membership is growing, currently at about 375 members, and it practices the sport and hosts tournaments from October through to March, with clubs from around the country and the world taking part.
The club’s lower floor facilities, including the kitchen, dining room, bar and locker rooms (with the standard tartan carpeting in a nod to curling’s Scottish origins), will remain intact. This beloved space will remain intact.
The curling can be seen not only from the Senior Center’s hallway windows, but also from the Firefly Room, where the fireplace stones are dotted with ancient reef fossils (possibly from nearby former quarries at Hartung Park or even closer, Schoonmaker Reef Quarry in Tosa), and from the upstairs Riverview Room, with its impressive vaulted ceiling and a small stage at one end. The Firefly Room fireplace and one of its fossils. XX
Briand said the club’s biggest challenge is maintaining proper ice temperature and condition due to the rink’s aging ice-making equipment.
“We’re really excited,” she said. “With this renovation, we’re getting ice pieces. The city building has been upgraded, and we’re getting the ice we wanted and the viewing space we wanted.”
“The city and the club have been working together on this effort for a long time, and our members have really stepped up. They had a lot of fundraising to do, but it was done quickly. For example, we formed a group at Brewers games all summer long, worked at the concession stand, and raised funds to get this project done.”
“So everyone really stepped up in a big way and you could feel the excitement.”
