Construction crews recently demolished the iconic Pabst smoke stack at the former Pabst brewery in downtown Milwaukee. Attempts to save the smoke stack and the building that it sat on were unsuccessful, said Mike Mervis, assistant to Joseph Zilber, the founder of Zilber Ltd. who is redeveloping the former brewery property. The building and the smoke stack were in bad condition, Mervis said. The building, constructed in 1948, lacks architectural significance, and there was no practical way to reuse it, Mervis said. "The building was structurally challenged, at best," he said. Therefore, the only way to save the smoke stack would have been to try to lift it off the building, but then it may have fallen apart, Mervis said. The building was used as an incinerator and didn’t have any floors in it, Mervis said. "It’s just a big open cavernous structure with a huge boiler and coal bins," said Jim Haertel, an expert on the Pabst brewery site who plans to redevelop a small portion of it. "Each time (a building in the brewery complex) goes down it hurts a little bit. I feel I failed to come up with a use to save it."
The tiles used for the P-A-B-S-T letters on the smoke stack are being saved for reuse, Mervis said. A major advantage of tearing down the building that the smoke stack sat on is that the west side of two historic buildings on the brewery property will be exposed for the first time in almost 60 years. Those buildings feature attractive windows and, with the incinerator building gone, natural light will shine through those windows, making the space more attractive. "These are spectacular two-story windows," Mervis said. "We would have liked to save (the smoke stack). But these are the types of horse trades you get with historic preservation."
Conceptual plans for Zilber’s Pabst redevelopment had included a hotel at the site of the smoke stack building. Now it appears some of the site will remain vacant and the rest will be developed for another use. A hotel could still be built in the brewery complex, but likely at a different site, Mervis said. In addition, Zilber plans to restore the rotating sign on top of the grain elevators, Mervis said.
