Lakefront Brewery turns storage lot into new Milwaukee greenspace
Lakefront Brewery turned a storage lot beside its beer hall into a greenspace with picnic tables, lawn games and event space. The $60,000 project bets on longer visits, not a bigger brewhouse.
Lakefront Brewery turned a storage lot beside its beer hall on North Commerce Street into a greenspace, spending about $60,000 to add picnic tables, lawn games and room for events on the riverfront property. The new outdoor area sat between 1870 and 1872 N. Commerce St., near the Milwaukee River and the Holton Street Bridge, and it was nearly finished by June 26.
The move mattered because it took otherwise nonproductive square footage and turned it into guest-facing space that could keep people on site longer. Lakefront aimed the lawn at overflow crowds and at drinkers looking for a place to enjoy the outdoors, a small but useful shift for a brewery that already had a destination taproom and beer hall.
That approach fit Lakefront’s larger history. Founded in 1987 by brothers Russ and Jim Klisch, the brewery started in a former bakery in Riverwest before moving in 1998 to its current home at 1872 N. Commerce St., a former Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company coal-fired power plant built in 1908. Lakefront said its production reached nearly 3,000 barrels in 1998 and 46,848 barrels in 2017, a reminder that its growth has often come through incremental changes to the property rather than a single giant expansion.
The new greenspace also followed a string of outdoor upgrades. Lakefront improved its Riverwalk beer garden in 2022 and added a patio along the Milwaukee River in 2023, extending the amount of time guests could spend outside on the campus. Russ Klisch said the lawn could also host vendors, a night market or an art fair, which would push the space beyond simple seating and into a more flexible event asset.
The lawn was expected to be ready later this summer, though it might need another week or two to fully root. For Lakefront, that timing underscored the point of the project: the brewery was not adding tanks or chasing a bigger footprint, it was making its existing Milwaukee home work harder. The former storage lot was becoming another reason to linger.
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