Centerline Design & Fabrication, a company offering turn-key solutions for end-to-end manufacturing, is moving its headquarters from Waukegan, Illinois to the former Bucyrus International campus in South Milwaukee. On Monday, the company announced it has signed a lease for the building at 1123C E. Rawson Ave.
The new South Milwaukee headquarters is approximately 30,000 square feet, about four times the size of the company’s previous location in Waukegan. There will initially be about 10 employees working at the new South Milwaukee headquarters, with plans to hire in between 10 to 15 people by the end of the year. The relocation will allow Centerline to expand operations.
“With the expansion and relocation of our headquarters to downtown South Milwaukee, we will now be able to offer even more high production, while also providing gainful employment opportunities to the Milwaukee area economy,” said
Adam Buckley, president of Centerline Design & Fabrication.
He added the city of South Milwaukee, as well as the
Milwaukee 7, were helpful partners from the start of its headquarters relocating planning, offering any assistance the company needed.
“We took a long time with this search,” said Buckley. “With the COVID situation and the commercial real estate market over the last few years, finding a new home was difficult. Our commercial broker and I did a lot of searching and the building in South Milwaukee was one of the very few that checked a lot of our boxes.”
Centerline joins a growing list of tenants at the former Bucyrus International campus, including Steele Solutions Inc., Dawn Equipment and Badger Industries.
Bucyrus was acquired by Caterpillar in 2011, and over time Caterpillar has significantly reduced operations in South Milwaukee.
“We’ve taken the last major building but there’s still ongoing upgrades to the complex as a whole,” said Buckley.
He hopes the company can be fully moved into the new building in the next two to three weeks.
Last winter, developer Que El-Amin also submitted a new redevelopment plan for a portion of the former Bucyrus International campus.
The project calls for 92 mixed-income apartment and loft-style units – a combination of one 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom units – as well as about 22,000 square feet of commercial space. The plan also calls for activated green spaces and two outdoor art alleys.
“We are please to welcome Centerline to the former Bucyrus campus and downtown South Milwaukee,” said Mayor
Jim Shelenske. “In our discussions with them and Milwaukee 7, we concluded that this was the best place for them to grow. We’re proud to include them with the high-quality manufacturing tenants already on site.”
