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And that’s not all. Yes, the Hank
Aaron State Trail has a distinctly urban
and industrial character. But even as
it winds through Milwaukee, around
downtown, past the Harley-Davidson
Museum, near the Miller Brewery and
beyond the Wisconsin state fairgrounds,
it offers the allure of a quiet getaway.
On the trail you may hear the chirp of
crickets, or see herons wading in the river.
Riding along a scenic stretch of riverbank
in the shadow of the Brewers baseball
stadium, I even find 19-year-old Chang
Xiong fishing. “I come down here to get
away from the stress,” he says, casting his
line for salmon and trout.
Wasteland Transformed
That would have been unthinkable 80
years ago, when the valley was home to
tanneries, stockyards, foundries, facto-
ries and the third-largest railroad facility
in the world—the sprawling, 160-acre
Milwaukee Road center, where tens of
thousands of train cars were built and
repaired, including the famed Hiawatha
streamliners that sped between Chicago
and the Twin Cities. In 1920, more than
50,000 people worked at plants along the
river.
“It was incredibly polluted,” local his-
torian John Gurda tells me over lunch at
a family-run Mexican restaurant on the
trail. “All the factories burned coal, and
you could see the smoke billowing out of
the valley.”
By the 1980s most of the industrial
plants had closed due to shifting eco-
nomic fortunes and relocation of jobs
out of Milwaukee. Even the sprawling
Milwaukee Road shops closed in 1985,
as the bankrupt company negotiated
a merger with the Soo Line railroad.
But considerable pollution remained.
Environmental engineers found three feet
of diesel fuel floating on top of ground-
water in the area. The Menomonee Valley
had become an environmental and eco-
nomic blight.
Milwaukee’s mayor at the time, John
Norquist, lived nearby and articulated a
vision of revitalization for the area, start-
ing with a bike trail named for the slug-
ger with the second-most home runs in
baseball history. Mike Brady, who rides
the Hank Aaron to his job as employee
benefits director for the city, tells me how
he first learned of plans for the trail. “It
was about 1994 and John Norquist calls
me up and says, ‘Let’s meet by the river,’
which was about midway between our
houses. I get there and he lays out the
whole idea for the trail, saying it’s going
to give the entire neighborhood a place to
play and work.”
Norquist (now president of the
Congress for the New Urbanism, an
organization that promotes community
vitality across the country) spread his
enthusiasm to local neighborhoods,
city leaders, state officials and the busi-
ness community. These groups worked
Lakeshore State Park
at the eastern end
of the trail along
Lake Michigan.