Doyne Park

The first thing you notice about Doyne Park is what it doesn’t look like. There’s no sweeping entrance, no dramatic signage. You come in off a side street on Milwaukee’s west side, drop down a small hill, and suddenly the park opens up, mowed walking paths cutting through a field, trees on all sides.

What most people don’t notice is what’s underneath.

Doyne Park sits on a capped landfill. The gentle hills that give it a natural feel are the result of decades of compacted garbage and a clay cap. Visible in a few spots across the park are aeration structures, metal housings that vent gases from below. Most visitors walk right past them. Linda Bacelis-Bush, who co-founded Friends of Doyne about three years ago, estimates that maybe a third of the neighborhood knows the history. “The older neighbors are very aware,” she says. “People who have been here a long time. Newer neighbors, I don’t think, are probably aware of it.”

That layered history is what makes Doyne unusual, even by Milwaukee standards.

Milwaukee was once called the machine shop of the world. People know the high-profile names: Harley Davidson, Briggs & Stratton, Milwaukee Tool. They don’t usually know about the foundries, the tanneries, the factories that have vanished from memory but not from the soil. That industrial past left an unwelcome inheritance: land that looks usable but isn’t, at least not without significant intervention. Contaminated parcels are located in public parks throughout the county. Environmental assessments are part of every project conversation. It’s a reality Milwaukee has learned to work around.

Doyne’s land started as a limestone quarry, one of many that dotted the area in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Then, like many of them, it became a landfill. After a remediation that ended with a cap, it became a par-3 golf course, a modest operation where generations of northside residents learned the game. When golf interest declined and Milwaukee County Parks decommissioned it a few years ago, the community had a choice to make. What should it be next?

That question led to a series of community meetings. Neighbors showed up. Ideas went on the board: dog park, disc golf, pickleball, bike trails. Votes were cast. Bacelis-Bush was surprised by some of what she heard. “I thought there would be more people who wanted a dog park, because there are lots of dog owners in the neighborhood.” Pickleball had opponents, too, which also caught her off guard.

What rose to the top: mountain bike trails and native prairie restoration.

That outcome didn’t happen in isolation. Friends of Doyne had been building the kind of community trust that makes decisions like this possible. The group formed during the pandemic, growing out of a loose neighborhood energy that had found small ways to keep people connected. A neighbor organized socially distanced sing-alongs. Someone else put together a Fourth of July parade so people could celebrate without gathering in crowds. A handful of residents eventually said yes to forming a formal friends group, going through the process with Milwaukee County Parks to make it official. They started with what Bacelis-Bush calls easy, low-commitment engagement: weed outs. No expenses, no expertise required, just showing up. “We got some people involved who we’d never seen before,” she says. Word spread. Now they run four regular events a year, including a fall tailgate where neighbors watch football and share a potluck in the park.

That kind of organizing doesn’t look dramatic. But it’s what makes a community meeting productive instead of contentious. When people already feel invested in a place, they make better decisions about its future.

When the community voted for trails, Metro Mountain Bikers was ready. The Milwaukee volunteer organization had been building and maintaining trails in Milwaukee County for over 30 years, and Kevin Eccles, Metro’s board chair, had been thinking about what Doyne could become. Just as important as Metro’s technical capability was its relationship with Milwaukee County Parks, built over three decades of showing up, following through, and earning trust. That history didn’t just open doors; it shortened the conversation considerably.

That relationship paid off in December 2025, when Milwaukee County Parks approved the concept plan for Doyne. The plan includes a mixed-use mountain bike trail and, in later phases, a cyclocross course, a flow trail, a skills area, and potentially a pump track.

For Eccles, the approval is personal. “My primary motivation is the nearly 2,000 middle and high school students in the Wisconsin NICA mountain bike league. Milwaukee County is currently underrepresented, and I want to provide the infrastructure to change that.” The numbers back him up. The City of Milwaukee has just under two miles of mountain bike trail, among the lowest per capita of any major Rust Belt city. He sees the park’s urban location not as a limitation, but as exactly the point: Kids shouldn’t have to drive forty minutes to find a place to ride.

The terrain at Doyne makes that case on its own. The rolling hills lend themselves to trails that will meet the needs of new and tentative riders without boring experienced ones. There’s enough variation in a relatively small area to support short downhill flow lines alongside beginner-friendly loops, which is rarer than it sounds in an urban park. Think of it as a weeknight trail rather than a weekend destination: close enough to ride after work, approachable enough for a kid on their first real bike, with enough to keep an experienced rider coming back once the advanced features are in place.

The destination is clear. The path there is being built.

Sarah Toomsen, director of planning for Milwaukee County Parks, describes Doyne as unlike most park projects she works on. “I think what’s unique about Doyne is what it touches. It touches a river, it touches residential. It has the Oak Leaf Trail running through it, as well as nearby schools and daycares.” That density of adjacent uses creates both opportunity and complexity. Design decisions that might be routine in a suburban park require a different level of care when someone’s backyard is thirty feet away, or when a daycare full of kids uses the park every week. “We have to begin from where we are and who our neighbors are,” she says.

There’s also the ground itself. Because Doyne is a former landfill, certain features are simply off the table. “We can’t dig down,” Bacelis-Bush explains. “We can’t make any big structural changes that require digging and putting in cement blocks.” Soft surface trails and prairie restoration don’t require disturbing the cap. They work with what the land can give. That constraint, frustrating as it might sound, is also clarifying: it narrows the choices and focuses the energy on what’s possible.

Attorney Bruce Keyes has spent his career learning to see possibilities in exactly this kind of terrain. Of counsel at Foley & Lardner, Keyes has practiced environmental and real estate law in Milwaukee for nearly three decades, with a particular focus on brownfield redevelopment and contaminated urban sites. He's served as lead counsel on two of the region’s most notable reclamation projects: the development of Ballpark Commons, the largest project in Wisconsin built on a closed landfill, and the Kenosha Innovation Neighborhood redevelopment of a 107-acre former Chrysler facility. He also co-founded Bublr Bikes, Milwaukee’s nonprofit bike share, and played a leading role in developing the Hank Aaron State Trail.

He’s also been a friend to Metro Mountain Bikers for years. When the Doyne conversation comes up, he doesn’t flinch at the landfill part. “Big structures with deep foundations don’t work well,” he says. “So that then means you have this available land, and the question is what’s the best use for it? And if you can respect the cap issues, then it’s very well suited to do something like trails.”

The cap constraint, in other words, isn’t a dealbreaker; it’s a filter. It rules out certain things and points clearly toward others. Keyes is matter-of-fact about the broader contamination reality, too. “Pretty much every property has some form of contamination on it, even if it’s from diesel exhaust. In Milwaukee, that’s not a reason to stop. It’s just the starting condition.”

The concept approval from Milwaukee County Parks in December 2025 is real and significant, but it’s the beginning of the process, not the end. The first phase, cross-country mountain bike trails, is within Metro’s capability to deliver relatively quickly, following the established Milwaukee County Parks trail-building process. The later phases are a different story. The flow trail, the skills area, and the potential pump track all require additional planning and fundraising that haven’t happened yet. “Metro MTB has historically operated on a small budget fueled by individual donations,” Eccles says. “The Doyne project is a much larger undertaking.”

Nobody here is pretending the hard part is over. The gap between concept approval and an open trail is real, and the people closest to this project are clear-eyed about it. But this community didn’t arrive at this moment empty-handed.

Bacelis-Bush has watched Doyne evolve for years, first as a neighbor, then as someone with a formal role in shaping its future. She’s seen dog walkers take over in winter when the golf course goes quiet. She’s seen new faces show up to weed out and stay. “I think we’re very lucky to have Doyne Park,” she says. “I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve and what it’ll look like next year.”

The land has been a quarry. A landfill. A golf course. Each chapter served the needs of its era and then gave way to the next. The trails aren’t built yet. But the people are already there, and they already know how to use what they have. In Milwaukee, that’s how it starts.