Here are all the new and wonderful things they’re building in Milwaukee (September 10-23, 2025)

Depending on which news sources you follow, Milwaukee is going through either a “renaissance” or a “reinvention.” However you want to define it, it’s safe to say that Milwaukee is currently building a lot of new and wonderful things! Here are some of them, brought to you by GTG Home Buyers!

• After sitting empty for more than 20 years, and after more than a year of demolition work, the once-mighty Northridge Mall is officially, finally, 100-percent gone. Demolished. Kaput. Expired. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. This is an ex-mall.

Crews from demolition company Veit knocked down the remaining Northridge structures the night of September 17. “It’s official. The former Northridge Mall is down, paving the way for future development,” Milwaukee’s Department of City Development posted the next morning. “The final structural demolition occurred last night. Crews worked hard to ensure the safest environment possible. They made surgical cuts in the steel beams and pulled the structure with cables. Activity now moves into earthwork. The DCD team is currently in the redevelopment planning process and anticipates listing the site for sale in early 2026.”

A visit to the site this afternoon confirmed that, yep, any remaining chunks of Northridge are gone, baby, gone:

The now-empty site has been dubbed “Granville Station.” It will be used for…something. Got any ideas of what that something should be? You can share them HERE.

Here’s what the mall—opened in 1972, closed in 2003—looked like in its heyday:

And here’s what it looked like in July 2024. R.I.P.

• They sure have been building a lot of new and wonderful “traffic calming” projects lately, haven’t they? You know, speed humps, bump outs, traffic circles, bikes lanes, etc. And there are more on the way! But are those projects actually doing anything?

According to the Department of Public Works (DPW), they are! Last week, DPW and Mayor Cavalier Johnson held a press conference to unveil “data showing reductions in speed and crashes on streets where traffic calming projects have been completed.”

The data shows that crashes on those streets are down 15%…

…and that speeding is down 27%…

Not bad! (Complain in the comments anyway.) Oh, and the traffic calming projects are all part of Milwaukee’s Vision Zero Action Plan, which aims to “eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2037.”