ONMILWAUKEE

This has been a bad year for churches designed by architects Brust & Brust.

Over the past few months, St. Bernard in Wauwatosa Village – built in 1955 – came down remarkably quickly, especially considering that former Brust employee and later buyer of the firm, Gary Zimmerman, says the firm’s churches were built like battleships.

Next to fall is Brust & Brust’s St. Aloysius, 1405 S. 92nd St., in West Allis, which was completed in 1957.

Both sites will be filled with apartments. While the ones in Tosa are already underway, clearance of the West Allis site has not yet begun.

The parish was merged, along with two others – Immaculate Heart of Mary and Mary Queen of Heaven – into Mother of Perpetual Help Congregation in 2018 and they all began worshipping at one building, 2322 S. 106th St., three years later.

(A second site at 1121 S. 116th St. includes a secondary worship site, Mary Queen of Saints Catholic Academy, parish offices and an outreach center.)

St. Aloysius hosted its final Mass in May 2021. The school had closed a year earlier.

At that time, Cardinal Capital Management purchased the site, but its plans for the site did not move quickly enough, and now F Street is in the process of buying the site via the City of West Allis.

“The idea is that all the existing buildings will come down and then working our way from the south to the north, we would probably do two-story garden-style apartments,” says F Street’s Director of Project Delivery E. J. Herr. “Those would be walkups with garages and things like that.”

One row of the houses would face 92nd Street and the other, at its back, would face 93rd.

“We’re working with Rinka Architects right now, developing the site plan,” Herr says. “We have preliminary diagrams of how things are to layout, but it’s still pretty early on. Right now we’re looking at about 52 units between those two (garden-style) buildings and another 100 units in the multi-family.”

It’s possible that some of the units could be used as student athlete housing for a nearby college, Herr says.

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