A day in the life of City Hall

Milwaukee project challenges Terry Watson and his team

By Paul Snyder

Photo by Paul Snyder

There’s a certain four-letter word floating around Milwaukee’s City Hall on an early December morning.

All the workers arriving on site are saying it. It’s a topic of discussion at the scaffolding training session. It’s the first word out of Terry Watson’s mouth as he enters his office at 7 a.m. in the job’s trailer just east of the 110-year-old building.

“Cold enough for you?” he asks.

Watson is Janesville-based J.P. Cullen & Sons Inc.’s project manager on the City Hall renovation — which includes historical restoration work on the exterior as well as reconstruction of the building’s clock tower — and he knows weather is one of the first things he’ll deal with on Dec. 19. As cold as it is on the ground, it’ll be worse on the $5.5 million worth of scaffolding that wraps the building. And when the sun rises over the city, it’s going to be of little help.

He decides not to send up workers on the west side of the building. It’s just too cold, and, as the workers learn in scaffolding training, that kind of weather threatens productivity and personal safety.

Some project managers might be disheartened at the thought of a day’s worth of work lost, but Watson knows there’s still plenty left to keep people busy. They’ll just have to work on the building’s east side today.

“When people ask me to describe what I do, I say, ‘I solve problems,’” he says. “A lot of them are solved by planning ahead, but little things come up.

“You can’t get upset by them. You just say, ‘Okay, what’s the best way to do it?’ We’re pretty much on an even keel all the time on this project.”

Netting covers columns at the top of Milwaukee's City Hall to catch pieces of falling terra-cotta. Photo by Paul Snyder

Every Monday starts with scaffolding training on site for new workers, and Dec. 19 is no exception. The City Hall project is one of the largest scaffolding jobs in the Midwest in the last few years, and Cullen, the city of Milwaukee and Waukesha-based Safway Services Inc., the company handling the scaffolding, deliver training as a team.

Carrie Heller, Safway’s safety manager, peppers the training session with pop quizzes to keep everyone focused. It covers presentations on safety harnesses, what pieces of scaffolding to hook pelican clips to, lift-riding procedures and an on-site safety video.

The training team also reminds workers that they’re on stage in front of the entire city and should behave and perform in an appropriate manner.

“It’s a bit of a sore thumb for the city’s taxpayers already,” says Ed Land, a city inspector. “They’ve been told they’ll be shelling it out for this $60 million project already. Let’s not aggravate the situation by acting like idiots up there.”

Everyone in attendance must sign in on all the representatives’ attendance sheets to verify training. If they don’t, they’re not going up.

Back in his trailer, Watson fields calls and discusses the day’s plans with Donald Berendsen, the project superintendent.

“Don really cares about what he does,” Watson says. “He’s really passionate about it. That translates to everybody else, so it makes my job a lot easier to have somebody of that caliber to work with.”

While Berendsen pours over blueprints, updating them with recent changes and preparing for future alterations, James Otto walks in.

Scaffolding surrounds the Milwaukee City Hall clock tower, which will be brought down and rebuilt with a new copper roof. Photo by Paul Snyder

Otto, who works for Engberg Anderson Design Partnership Inc. in Milwaukee, is the principal architect on the renovation.

“They didn’t plan out buildings in 1895 like they do today,” he says. “We have a rough set of blueprints to work with, but there’s not a lot of detail. We’ll uncover certain things on the project and have to think, ‘Hmm, how are we going to figure this one out?’”

Otto is on hand to go up in the building with Douglas Ihlenfeldt, Cullen’s site engineer, and Mike Snell, Cullen’s masonry superintendent, to check the project’s progress.

The journey up reveals a lot of decay on the upper reaches of City Hall. Beyond repairing and replacing bricks and sandstone, the project team must focus on the building’s terra-cotta detailing.

Fixing the terra-cotta is the most time-consuming and costly process in the renovation. Many pieces and mockups are shipped to Milwaukee from across the country and then sent back for proper fitting. Replacing some of the pieces on the building can take as long as eight months.

But both Watson and Otto are excited to be restoring the building to original form with terra-cotta, even though the city’s climate is especially tiring on the material.

“A lot of what happens with terra-cotta — the reason it fails — is what happens to the anchoring system with the expansion and contraction of the building with the weather,” Watson says. “Water gets in, freezes and cracks, and the cracks just keep getting bigger and bigger.”

Watson says the aim is to seal up everything right this time.

“Our motto is, ‘Another hundred years,’” he says.

The $5.5 million in scaffolding blanketing City Hall creates an intricate maze for workers replacing and restoring the building's brick, sandstone and terra-cotta. Photo by Paul Snyder

The inspection also reveals how intricate Milwaukee City Hall is. Even on the upper reaches of the building, out of sight from below, there are gargoyles and patterns shaped in the building’s walls. All of it is under renovation, and some of it will have to be replaced completely.

Back on the ground, Watson considers the enormity of the project.

“Down here, it doesn’t look like it’s in bad shape, but when you get up there you say, ‘Yeah, it needs a little work,’” he says.

Following the inspection, Otto leaves while Ihlenfeldt, Snell, Watson and Berendsen meet in the trailer for storyboarding. With so many different factors on the project, the storyboard meetings are necessary every other day.

The project team lays out three weeks’ worth of scheduling on a large board with color-coded Post-It notes with messages like, “Safway to have 3 more levels up by 12/23,” and “Notify City and Lee mfg. for clock removal.”

A number of questions like, “Where are we on scaffolding?” and “Are the people from Cullen still coming out Friday?” are thrown out for discussion or placement on the board. The session lasts about 30 minutes.

Ihlenfeldt and Snell head back out onto the site, while Watson and Berendsen head back into their offices. Watson pauses to look once more at the board and smiles.
“Boy, we must be in pretty good shape,” he says. “Usually, the board’s a lot messier than this.”

After lunch, Watson takes a seat at his desk to work out some financial matters. Today, he’s preparing a pay request, a detailed process where he balances what’s complete on the project with what subcontractors are billing him for. Before he can turn the request over to Cullen’s corporate office, he must first run it past Berendsen and Otto for verification.

Once he turns it over to corporate, Watson gathers related documents, such as payroll and insurance forms, to back up the request. It’s this kind of work that eats up a lot of his days.

“Financials are probably 35 percent of what I do; schedule is probably another 20 to 25 percent,” he says. “I have a lot of coordination meetings to make sure everybody’s communicating and the owner knows what we’re doing. And if there’s any time left over, that’s when I spend time actually on the site, circulating around and seeing how things go.

“Next summer when things are really going faster, I’ll be doing more of the on-site type thing.”

After a few more calls, Watson packs up to leave the site by 2 p.m. Today, he has to drive for an hour and half to Cullen’s Janesville office for a monthly meeting for all the company’s project managers.

According to Watson, the Dec. 19 meeting involves Richard Cullen, the com-pany’s vice president of field operations, leading discussions on safety and productivity.

The group also discusses things such as the cost of concrete footing and new trends in insurance rates.

Watson says the meetings help managers work together and lets them share information on “red beads,” or any potential on-site problems that can keep managers from their project goals.

The meeting ends just after 6:30 p.m., and Watson gets back on the road for another long drive back to his home near Racine. He’s tallied another 12-hour day.

“As a minimum, a lot of days I don’t head home until about 7,” he says. “But there’s nothing I’d rather do. For me, it’s just a great time, and I’m amazed they pay me to do this.”

But for Watson, it’s more than just a great time. He says he’s developed a sense of ownership on the project.

“It’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment,” he says. “We were out with some friends who were kidding me because it’s not City Hall anymore; it’s my building. I said, ‘Is that what I say now?’ And my wife said, ‘Yeah, all the time.’

“But that’s how I feel about it. Some-times there are deadlines and little frustrations, but they don’t last long because there are so many upsides to being in construction and enjoying it.”