Veterans Park. Photo taken June 23, 2025 by Graham Kilmer. Last year, a group of county residents formed a new friends group to support Veterans Park. Now they want to transform it into a nationally recognized urban park. The plan is to start with a national design competition, inviting submissions from across the country. The effort is intended to produce a bounty of ideas for the community to draw from. Then the group will go after funding through government grants and private donors to implement the vision. The Friends of Veterans Park was organized by Graham Anderson, a civically-minded group manager at Milwaukee Tool, and a handful of other Milwaukee residents around the idea of protecting and improving the park, a “gem” whose strengths are the beauty of its natural areas and lakefront location. “The park could benefit from substantial upgrades to both pedestrian infrastructure and the ecological stewardship… just being able to activate the space better, but also make it much more accessible for families,” Anderson told Urban Milwaukee. The idea for redesigning the park is not to pave over green areas or put up gaudy new buildings, Anderson said. Rather, the ultimate goal is a long-term plan for building on the park’s natural beauty and existing uses, and maintaining the park’s central theme of honoring and memorializing military veterans. It asks, “How do we amplify what the park already is today to make it be better?” Anderson said. The design competition will look outside Milwaukee, across the country and potentially the world, for designers and landscape architects working at the top of their field, Anderson said. The county parks system has a history of employing world-class designers to work on county parks. The system boasts three parks — Washington, Riverside and Lake — designed by the father of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. “We’ve got a lot of civic pride in those things,” Anderson said. Under a proposed agreement with Milwaukee County Parks, the competition will invite submissions from three “nationally recognized design firms.” The firms will be paid for their work and their participation in the competition. The winner will be awarded additional prize money. The competition will take approximately one year. The plan right now is to have the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC) manage the competition, working with the friends group and parks to engage community stakeholders and communicate with the public. The three organizations will work together to select design firms, park planners and landscape architects who will be invited to submit designs. A seven-member jury of design professionals and local government officials will review the designs and pick a winner. The winning design will be used to plan the future of Veterans Park, which may incorporate elements from other submissions. To transform the park, the friends group needs to develop a base of financial and public support. The design competition will serve a dual purpose, sourcing ideas for the park and raising awareness for the overall campaign. “It’s hard to it’s hard to rally broad support without a vision,” Anderson said. “Part of the purpose of the design competition is to bring that forward in a way the community can get behind.” The county has very limited funding for new park infrastructure. The friends group plans to seek state and federal grants, as well as private fundraising, to support future improvements, Anderson said. The agreement between the friends group and Parks will be considered by the Milwaukee County Board’s Committee on Parks and Recreation in March.
