1970s to present

Image 1
Sooner or later, every building must fall, even the coach house of the historic Pabst Mansion at 2000 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee. Luckily, the wrecking ball isn't exactly sentimental, and it did its job on this work site in 1977.

Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Negative No. WhiCF 5985
Image 2
Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District construction crews lay the groundwork at a boring machine staging area at the MMSD's County Stadium site in September 1985. Once assembled, the boring machine ripped apart tunnel rock to expand the Crosstown Tunnel, which picks up outflow along the Menomonee River and redirects the flow to the Milwaukee Deep Tunnel and, eventually, to Jones Island.

Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District
Image 3
It's a wonder that such an enormous machine could shred so much rock beneath the streets of Milwaukee without so much as a tremor on the surface, but that's exactly what the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District accomplished in the North Shore Tunnel in 1990. The cutter wheels on the machine crushed the rock and spouted it onto a conveyor belt stretching the length of the tunnel to an access shaft in Glendale near the old Schlitz towers.

Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District
Image 4
Luckily, this is only a test. A trench rescue seminar student takes the easy way out of a Milwaukee sewer during a 1996 training class. The Wisconsin Underground Contractors Association sponsored the seminar.

Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Underground Contractors Association
Image 5
A J.F. Shea Company employee leads a 1991 tour group into the dark, murky depths of the Deep Tunnel in Milwaukee. You can tell by the tracks that the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District boring machine is still at work making the Deep Tunnel even deeper.

Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Underground Contractors Association

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