These timelapses show Milwaukee transforming over 70 years, from Bronzeville to American Family Field

Every day, our neighborhoods are changing: A grocery store closes down the corner. A street is built near a neighbor's home. Empty buildings are torn down and replaced with luxury apartments.

Some of these changes are barely perceptible; others create new landmarks, transforming the city.

Using aerial photographs of Milwaukee County taken between 1937 and 2020 and collected by the Milwaukee County Land Information Office, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stitched together timelapses of some of the city's most striking makeovers.

An old stone quarry becomes American Family Field

Construction of Milwaukee County Stadium, the first major league ballpark built with public money, began in 1950 on land owned by the federal Veterans Administration and the former Story Quarry. The video above shows construction of the stadium underway in 1951, south of what is now I-94.

In 1953, the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee and made County Stadium their home field. The Braves set attendance records, won a World Series and, in 13 seasons, never had a losing record — but they still moved to Atlanta after the 1965 season. Just before the 1970 season, an ownership group led by Bud Selig bought the bankrupt Seattle Pilots and moved them into County Stadium, where they played for 30 years as the Milwaukee Brewers.

After a political battle, construction of what is now American Family Field began on a site just southeast of the old stadium in 1996. Due to a deadly construction crane collapse, the new stadium was still being built in 2000 (seen side-by-side with the old County Stadium in the video above).

American Family Field, with expanded parking lots east of the Menomonee River, opened with the start of the 2001 season. The old County Stadium was eventually razed to make way for parking and a smaller, Little League-size ballfield, Helfaer Field.

Bronzeville, the heart of Milwaukee's Black community, is decimated for I-43

From the 1930s to 1950s, Bronzeville was the heart of Black culture and business in Milwaukee.

The neighborhood, with a mix of African-American, European and Jewish residents, was home to civil rights leader Malcom X and Academy Award-winning actress Hattie McDaniel. Walnut Street, packed with shops and nightlife, was its main thoroughfare. And famous musicians like Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong all played in Bronzeville's jazz and blues clubs.

However, in the late 1960s, "urban renewal" plans led to more than 8,000 houses in the neighborhood being torn down to make way for I-43, displacing tens of thousands of residents and disrupting the community's economic growth.

"Black neighborhoods were literally the paths of least resistance," historian John Gurda explained in 2022. "Low property values and weak political opposition made them easy targets for the transportation engineers."

Today, the area is split into neighborhoods like Halyard Park, Triangle North, Hillside, and Haymarket, but local leaders and community members are revitalizing Bronzeville's rich history through new arts and development projects.

A Milwaukee landfill becomes Veterans Park

Before it became Milwaukee’s front lawn, with some of the best views in Wisconsin, Veterans Park was a landfill.

The 94-acre park, along the lakefront north of the War Memorial Center (seen at lower left in the video above), began as a Milwaukee County land reclamation project in 1957.

Called the McKinley landfill, the green space was used in the 1960s as a staging area for the city’s Fourth of July fireworks, and later as the starting point for the annual Great Circus Parade.

In 1963, the Park Commission began building a public marina and filling the area with rubble. The newly-constructed protective bulkhead is visible in the aerial photograph from 1967. In 1970, work began on adding more boat slips and a couple of small outbuildings to the site, connecting the park to McKinley Marina and McKinley Beach to the north (both visible at the top of the video).

After years of alternative proposals, the McKinley landfill was re-landscaped and renamed Veterans Park in 1990.

An old missile site is repurposed into the Summerfest grounds

Summerfest draws hundreds of thousands of people each year to Milwaukee's lakefront. But not many people know that the ground they’re standing on was a missile site during the Cold War.

Throughout the 1950s, the U.S. built missile sites in cities across the nation to defend against potential bomb threats from other countries. The 1956 image in the timelapse above shows what used to be Milwaukee's airport, Maitland Field, shortly before it was repurposed into an area to store — and launch, if necessary — Nike Ajax missiles.

However, the missile site on Milwaukee’s lakefront was declared obsolete within seven years. In 1968, the first Summerfest was held on the grounds. By 1980, new Summerfest buildings and stages can be seen taking their modern-day shape, and the recently-constructed Hoan Bridge is also visible.

Over the decades, the site blossomed into the familiar festival grounds beloved by many today.

What else do you want to see?

Eva Wen is a data reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She can be reached at [email protected]. Chris Foran writes about entertainment, popular culture and local history at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He can be reached at [email protected]. Andrew Hahn is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's newsroom developer. He can be reached at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Watch the transformation of Milwaukee's American Family Field, Summerfest, Veterans Park, and Bronzeville