Category: Parks

You’ve probably noticed a lot of park upgrades over the past few years. It’s not all a coincidence. Almost exactly three years ago, the Village Board adopted a Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan (CORP), and since then the board, along with the Department of Public Works, has acted on a number of the ideas laid out in that document. Here’s a look at what’s already been tackled, and what may be coming next.

What is the CORP, anyway?

The Village Board adopted the CORP in August 2023. It was intended to be a five-year roadmap, covering 2024 through 2028, developed by Village staff with their consultant (GRAEF), built on an inventory of all ten of the parks within the Village boundaries, a resident survey, and a comparison against peer North Shore communities. The plan also matters for the Village’s bottom line: having an adopted CORP is a prerequisite for applying for outdoor recreation grants through the Wisconsin DNR.

The community survey behind the plan drew 400 responses. Eighty-four percent of respondents said they were at least “somewhat satisfied” with the quality of Whitefish Bay’s parks, but when asked what needed work, three themes came up again and again: aging playground equipment, better accessibility, and continued restoration of the lakeshore, beaches and bluffs. Looking at what’s gotten built since, the Village has been checking those boxes.

What’s already happened

Klode Park bluff stabilization and stormwater management. The Village Board awarded the construction contract in June 2024. The design added a regenerative stormwater conveyance system, two bioswales, and native restoration and invasive-species removal across the bluff’s terraces, treating an estimated 75,000 gallons of stormwater runoff. Three grant sources totaling $250,000 funded it: the Fund for Lake Michigan, the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program, and MMSD Green Solutions. Construction was completed in 2025.

Klode Park landscaping. Reforestation and landscaping work, funded through an MMSD grant that also supported the arboretum at Library Park, wrapped up in October 2025.

Klode Park playground. After residents voted on concept designs, work began in April 2024 on a new playground to replace the decades old wooden structure. The Kid Builder Little Tikes structure was built while keeping the sandbox and tree/bush thicket intact. 

Cahill Square Park playground. Residents also had the chance to vote on concept designs. Construction started in April 2025, and the new playground opened that summer. It replaced the old structure with a modular BCI Burke “Play That Moves You” structure, added poured-in-place and engineered wood fiber surfacing for better accessibility, and kept legacy features like the sandbox and swings.

Library Park Arboretum. The small green strip on Marlborough Drive just north of the library got a complete makeover. Work began in October 2025, with contractors clearing existing vegetation and invasive species before crews moved in to plant more than 150 new trees and shrubs representing over two dozen species. The Village’s Public Works staff followed up in spring 2026 with a new walking path through the grounds. The project was funded in part by a grant from the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. The pathway officially opened July 24, 2026 — making it one of the freshest completed items on the whole list. 

Beyond the headline projects, the Village has been working on less visible infrastructure projects as well. The most significant, of course, was a multi-million dollar repair of a 90-plus-year-old storm sewer that collapsed and opened a major sinkhole beneath Buckley and Big Bay Parks (a surprise project – not in the CORP). Stormwater management improvements have also been completed at Craig Counsell Park. On the smaller end, Cahill received a new accessible sidewalk connecting the playground to the warming house, bathrooms, and tennis courts.

What may come in the future

The CORP lays out a potential year-by-year Capital Improvement Plan through 2028, though every line item is subject to Village Board approval and funding as budgets are finalized. With the exception of the Klode Park warming house, the highlights below have not been formally adopted.

A few highlights:

• Klode Park warming house: the long-discussed replacement is in the design phase now, with initial concepts recently made public. It’s currently on the books for 2027 at roughly $1.5 million.
• A potential sand volleyball installation. Also penciled into the 2027 CIP, but hasn’t been formally presented to the Public Works Committee yet.
• Klode Park trail replacement and stairwell repair: for 2027. 
• Cahill Park Pavilion Upgrade: for 2028. 

Where to see it yourself

The full plan, including the park-by-park inventory, survey results, and year-by-year CIP budget, is available from the Village here.

Today’s post draws on research from the superb Mimi Bird Collection and the Milwaukee Journal archives. If you haven’t already, you need to check out/follow the work being done by the Historic WFB page on Facebook. Additional recommended reading includes “Historic Whitefish Bay: A Celebration of Architecture and Character” by Jefferson Aikin and Thomas Fehring

With the village of Whitefish Bay currently weighing plans to replace the aging warming house at Klode Park, it felt like the right moment to revisit the park’s surprisingly contentious beginnings and how a dispute over the first warming house ended up in court nearly a century ago.

The story starts with a political maneuver that would feel right at home in a Netflix drama.

In 1928, the village set out to acquire the lakefront land that would become Klode Park. The seller? Frank C. Klode, the village president himself. State law prohibits (now, as it did then) elected officials from potential transactions that may include significant conflicts of interest, such as selling land directly to the village you represent, so a workaround was engineered: Klode resigned, a fellow trustee stepped up as interim president long enough to complete the transaction, and then promptly stepped back down so Klode could reclaim his seat. The park was named after him shortly after.

The Milwaukee Journal didn’t let it slide quietly. In a February 1929 editorial, the paper noted that the village, then a community of only about 4,000 people and rapidly growing, had agreed to pay $103,000 (roughly $2 million today) for the property with virtually no public discussion and no open board session before the deal was done. The Journal pointedly wondered whether suburban governments were really as close to the people as they liked to claim.

Mimi Bird, whose meticulous historical collection is one of the great treasures of Whitefish Bay, apparently had her own feelings on the naming of the park. She left a candid handwritten note about it in her records.

The controversy didn’t end with the purchase. Over the next two years, the park’s first warming house, referred to in the newspapers of the day as a “comfort station”, became its own source of conflict. Neighboring property owners S.L. Crolius and Adolph Lotter sued over the building’s location at the southern end of the park, arguing it would depreciate their property values by 25 to 35 percent. It’s worth noting that Klode’s own home sat at the northern end of the park, well away from the disputed site.

The case was eventually settled. The village agreed that after the 1930-31 skating season, the original structure would come down and a new one would be built closer to the center of the park, a compromise that put some distance between the building and the complaining neighbors. In what was likely no coincidence, the old structure was demolished in March 1931 the day before a village trustee election in which several candidates were running explicitly on an “anti-Klode”, “anti-administration” platform. Whether the timing was strategic or serendipitous, it made for tidy politics.

The park that caused so much fuss in its beginning days has been drawing people to the lakefront ever since. Nearly a century later, as the village considers what comes next for the warming house, it’s a good reminder that even the most beloved community spaces often have a complicated story behind them.

May 1st arrived in Whitefish Bay the way only Wisconsin can deliver it — low 40s with a light freezing rain tapping against the courts at Klode Park. It was a less than ideal backdrop for the first day of the village’s new, long-debated pickleball schedule.

The village installed locks on all three court gates as an enforcement mechanism for the new hours. A padlock went up today on the northeast corner gate, while magnetic timer locks were installed over the past few weeks on the southeast and northwest gates. The southeast gate will serve as the primary entrance and exit during play hours; the northwest gate will function as an exit-only egress allowing anyone to exit regardless of the locking mechanism being activated or not.

The new summer schedule eliminates open-ended play seven days a week between 8am and 8pm in favor of structured windows, with courts closed entirely on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Despite the raw weather, a few hearty players showed up for the morning session. And when 11:30 a.m. arrived, true to form, the orderly citizens of Whitefish Bay cleared the courts right on time!