Historian John Gurda recently wrote an editorial memoir about the many transformations the Kinnickinnic River has taken throughout Milwaukee's history.

Most recently, MMSD is in the process of buying up homes around the KK and plan to remove the concrete from the riverbed and begin to restore the river to a more natural state.

Gurda wrote, "Urbanization soiled it, Charles Whitnall saved it, city engineers denatured it, and now we're returning to Whitnall's vision."

[excerpted from the Journal-Sentinel]

by John Gurda

My memory is starting to feel suspiciously like my father's. He grew fond, in his later years, of describing a Milwaukee that no longer existed. He could talk at length about the German-speaking nuns at Holy Ghost grade school, the Polish businesses on Mitchell St. and - my favorite image - the babushka-clad women who were carted out to work every day in the celery fields west of his family's hardware store on S. 32nd and Lincoln.

At 63, I find myself revisiting my own vanished Milwaukee, and at the center of the scene is a waterway that's been in the news lately: the Kinnickinnic River. I spent the first eight years of my life in a postwar prefab on S. 34th St., a block north of the river. The stream had a decidedly rural character in those days. One of my earliest memories is of a group of much older boys swinging from a rope into a deep pool in the river just west of 35th St. To a kid of four or five, they seemed heroically daring.

My siblings and I crossed the Kinnickinnic hundreds of times on a graceful Lannon stone footbridge west of 35th, walking to Manitoba School for kindergarten and then to Blessed Sacrament for the primary grades. (Yes, parents once allowed their 4-year-olds to walk a half mile to school without supervision.)

Another favorite destination was the home of our Uncle Paul, a retired police captain who lived across the river on S. 38th St. Actually our great-uncle, he was a hero to our father and therefore a hero to us. It was a point of family pride that Paul Gurda was the first Polish captain to lead the Sixth Precinct. I crossed the bridge to visit him nearly every day in summer, and our father, who lacked his own garage on 34th St., parked his precious Chevrolet in Uncle Paul's every night. I can still vividly recall the long shadows we cast walking home across the Kinnickinnic parkway under a full summer moon.

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