St. Francis Made Two Promises On Howard Avenue. Only One Held Up.
Drive east on Howard Avenue toward the lake and you pass both of them. First, the building at Kinnickinnic and Howard that sat dark for more than five years and reopened its doors again last spring, packed on a Friday night the way it used to be. Then, closer to the water, the 13-acre lot bounded by Howard, Packard Avenue and Lake Drive that has sat empty for years, now at the center of a neighborhood fight over what it's finally going to become.
Both sites made a promise to the people who live around them. One kept it. The other is currently the reason a group of St. Francis homeowners started meeting, first around a campfire, then in city council chambers.
St. Francis Brewery opened in 2009 at 3825 S. Kinnickinnic Ave., a roughly 7,100-square-foot building right at the corner of Kinnickinnic and Howard, and ran for a decade before closing in 2019. The building sat empty until 2021, when a Franklin-based investment group bought it for $1.4 million. It sat empty again after that.
In January 2025, a Facebook post from Shallece Saleen and Dheren Stewart announced they were bringing it back. Stewart had spent years in restaurant management, including running a Texas Roadhouse and working at Chicago's Weber Grill, and had been looking for the right space to open something of his own. Saleen, a vocal arts teacher at UW-Milwaukee, wanted a venue where live music could be part of the regular rhythm, not an occasional add-on. They hired Tyler Killips as brewmaster, a Bay View brewing veteran who'd been the first employee at 1840 Brewing Company and was working at Enlightened Brewing when it closed earlier that same January.
St. Francis Brewery reopened to the public on April 14, 2025, timed to Milwaukee Day. The new owners kept the name and leaned into what people already knew and missed about the place: fish fry, cheese curds, a menu built around volume more than complexity, weekend live music. What changed most was ownership, energy, and the fact that a corner people had been driving past dark for half a decade was lit up again.
That's a small story in the scope of a city, but it's the kind of thing residents notice before almost anything else. A dark building on a visible corner reads as decline. A reopened one, run by people who did what they said they'd do, reads as the opposite.
The Triangle site is a different story, and it's been empty for longer. The 13-acre lot at Howard, Packard and Lake Drive has sat undeveloped for years while the city fielded proposals for what should go there. Homeowners who built near it, some as far back as nine years ago, say city officials told them at the time to expect a walkable retail corridor: shops, salons, restaurants, cafes.
Last September, BizTimes reported that the city was in talks with Cream City Real Estate Investments, an affiliate of Richfield-based KGI Construction Group, to buy the parcel. The proposal that surfaced wasn't retail-first. It was residential-first, with retail folded in around the edges.
"we were told that yes, this is going to be developed as a retail area"
That's how one resident, Marita Schifalacqua, described what she and her neighbors were told when they built their homes near the site. She's now part of a group called Community for the Triangle, and the gap between that promise and what's actually on the table is the entire reason the group exists.
The plan Cream City Real Estate brought forward calls for seven buildings across the 13 acres, and the scale is the part residents keep coming back to:
Three hundred apartment units and roughly 30,000 square feet of retail is a lot of program for a single 13-acre site, and a 13-story tower is a different scale entirely from the low-rise, walkable retail residents say they were originally promised.
Community for the Triangle didn't start as a formal advocacy group. By its own account, it started around a campfire last November, a handful of neighbors comparing notes on what they'd heard and hadn't heard from the city. It's grown since then into an organized push, and a Spectrum News 1 story published earlier this month, on August 5, 2026, captured a group that feels city leadership hasn't been listening to concerns about the project's scale.
The complaint isn't that the land is being developed. Nobody who bought a home near a long-vacant lot expected it to stay vacant forever. The complaint is specifically about what kind of development, and whether the promises made when people were choosing where to plant their forever homes still mean anything now that a developer has a different vision.
As of this writing, the Triangle proposal hasn't been approved or rejected. It's a live fight, which means the next city council or plan commission meeting is the place to actually find out where it stands, not a blog post written weeks or months out.
The Triangle isn't the only large residential project reshaping this stretch of St. Francis lakefront, and knowing that puts the fight in context. Along the same shoreline, on a 21-acre site at 3700 S. Lake Dr., M&R Development and Campbell Capital Group broke ground last September on The Bluffs on Lake, 278 apartment units in a four- and five-story building. It's expected to finish by the end of this year, with pre-leasing starting this fall.
The Bluffs is the same development team's second project on this stretch of lakefront. Their first, 42 Hundred on the Lake, opened in 2021 with 236 units immediately south of the new site. Between the two, that's more than 500 apartment units added along S. Lake Drive in about five years.
That context matters for how residents read the Triangle fight. This isn't a lone developer testing the market with an unusual proposal. It's part of a broader pattern of multifamily construction claiming vacant lakefront-adjacent land across St. Francis, and the Triangle site is simply the one where the promised use and the proposed use don't match.
If you live near either site, the practical version of this story is simple. The brewery is done. It reopened, it's operating on its normal hours, and it's back as a neighborhood fixture whether or not you've stopped in yet. The Triangle is not done. It's an active proposal working through the city's process, with an organized resident group pushing for changes to the scale and mix of what gets built.
The honest answer to what happens next is that nobody outside city hall and the developer knows yet. What's clear is that years of promises about that lot are now colliding with an actual proposal, and the outcome will shape what this corner of St. Francis looks and feels like for years to come.
Whether it's a reopened brewery or a contested high-rise, changes like these ripple into how a neighborhood feels to live in and, eventually, into how it's valued. If you're curious what any of this might mean for your own street or your own home, Elissa Berkoff knows this stretch of the North Shore and southern Milwaukee County well enough to talk it through. Let's connect, get your instant home valuation, and get a straight answer about what's actually happening around you.
Elissa is committed to providing exceptional value, personal care and service tailored to the requirements of her clients. The real estate experience that Elissa offers goes over and above what her clients expect. This is important as her goal is not to simply meet their expectations but to exceed them, even well beyond closing.
