To know and truly understand what is happening in our world right now, we need a sense of history. Few groups have a better claim to and handle on the history of our state than the Wisconsin Policy Forum. The impending move of our Milwaukee office has opened a window into our 113-year history for me and the rest of our staff.
For nearly four decades, the Forum’s Milwaukee office has been located in the Clark Building at 633 W. Wisconsin Avenue. Jean Tyler, one of my predecessors in leading the Forum, moved us to this building in 1987 because another tenant was expanding into our group’s prior space in the Fine Arts Building across from City Hall, which we had occupied since 1932. Apparently, every four to five decades the Forum finds itself in this position!
Now, the potential redevelopment of the Clark Building has led us to shift our operations to the Atlas Building at 600 W. Virginia Street, just south of Interstate 794 and the Menomonee River in Walker’s Point. As luck would have it, the building was built in 1913 – the year of the Forum’s founding – and housed the Pfister and Vogel Leather Company, which was one of the founding members of the Forum. Though Pfister and Vogel is no longer in operation, other Milwaukee companies and Forum members remain supporters now more than a century later.
As part of our move, we are going through roughly 350 banker’s boxes filled with files that have accumulated over the life of the organization. They document the painstaking work that the Forum has undertaken to unearth new facts and suggest improvements for our community. Sometimes these fixes are simple and practical, like the better streetlights we sought for Milwaukee in 1913. Our staff also found that many of the most complicated issues recurred decade after decade in our work – including reforms to pensions and schools.
Crucial documents, such as the Forum’s key business records and every publication we have labored to produce over the past century, will be retained and carefully shepherded to our new home. We went through a similar process in 2020, when we moved our Madison office following the 2018 merger of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, which was based in that office, with the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum, which ultimately formed a larger and stronger organization.
The contents of other boxes in the Clark Building, such as 1990s budgets for the state of Wisconsin or municipalities such as West Allis, are no longer needed and will either be replaced with electronic copies or discarded properly. This will make it easier to move in the future, whether that is needed in five years or another fifty.
I and the rest of the Forum staff feel both a sense of duty and great pride as we guide the organization through what we hope will be another age of accomplishment in helping Milwaukee and the rest of our state to navigate our complex world. We hope that our members feel that same sense of mission, history, and engagement in our shared work.