Wisconsin’s newest museum occupies one of the loveliest spots in Lake Geneva, high on a hill above the scenic south shore of the swanky getaway for Chicago’s well-to-do. It’s a beautifully preserved Queen Anne mansion from 1888, and the public is welcome. Sort of.
There are a few (ahem) conditions: No one can visit without a reservation. No one can drive their car to the site. And don’t even think about docking a boat at the home’s inviting pier. Only registered tour buses and charter boats are allowed.
No more than 47 people can visit at any one time, and no more than eight tour groups per day. No visitor can stay past 7 p.m., no tour can last longer than 90 minutes, and no more than 30 minutes of each visit can be used to walk around the grounds outside the museum building. The rest of the time must be spent inside.
There’s more: No one can step beyond the marked and fenced paths. No meals can be served, and hors d’oeuvres, if any, must be consumed indoors. Tour staff are required to monitor the activities of visitors at all times. Failure to comply could ultimately lead Walworth County to shut down the museum.
Welcome to Black Point, where for a decade the mansion’s owner and his neighbors have fought an epic battle over use of the property. The struggle ended, at least for now, with a treaty of sorts outlining all those rules, among others. But no one knows if the uneasy truce will hold and whether the public will want to visit a tourist site that is hostile to tourists.
The battle of Black Point pitted residents anxious to protect their privacy against a childless septuagenarian determined to donate his home to the state of Wisconsin as a historic site that anyone could visit. With the 10-year conflict over, the tour boats are finally hitting the beach.
But Black Point’s opponents believe that after initial curiosities are satisfied, practically no one will visit the old mansion, especially given all the restrictions. “We’re not too worried at this point,” says Stephen Sills, a nearby homeowner who spearheaded a legal campaign to block the project. “It’s a boondoggle, and a very poor use of public money. The concern was that it would draw busloads of people. I don’t see that happening. I don’t think it’s going to work.”
Those backing the museum remain just as confident that they can build traffic, even with the onerous curbs on visitors’ movements. As a tourist attraction, Black Point never will compete with the local water park, but it has a natural audience, its boosters say. They believe schoolchildren, empty-nesters and history buffs will flock to this one-of-a-kind time capsule illustrating the private lives of the super-rich at the turn of the last century.
Indeed, if it thrives, Black Point could help point the way for other projects in scenic spots around the country. And if it fizzles, it might serve as a warning to public officials who wrestle with the competing interests of preservationists and developers, of long-standing residents and new arrivals.
The great dilemma is how to retain the peaceful character of these hideaways, even as people pour in, says Calvin Beale, a veteran demographer at the U.S. Agriculture Department. “Everyone wants to use these attractive places, and if the crowds do use them, the setting changes and things deteriorate. There is no real satisfactory answer.”
The case of Black Point, he says, “shows that if people are concerned enough and have the money, they can influence the outcome. I’ve never heard of a museum with so many restrictions. You’d have to have an overwhelming desire to see it. I don’t think I would go.”
WHEN BILL PETERSEN set out in the mid-1990s to give away his family estate on the lake, he had no reason to think it would be so difficult to surrender a property with 650 feet of shoreline that’s now worth an estimated $10 million.
At the outset, he had plenty of support. His wife, Jane, backed the plan with the same tenacity that had made her a successful Chicago literary agent. Close friends helped him plot the strategy for converting Black Point into an architectural heritage museum. In 1995, he hired a can-do lobbyist who eventually advised him to sweet-talk the state of Wisconsin into taking it over. “We thought that in a year or two it would be done,” recalls Russell Hovde, president of the Black Point Historic Preserve, which manages the property for the state.
Unaware of the change afoot, Petersen’s neighbors were polite as ever to the gentlemanly steward of the architectural gem in their midst. Some hailed from families with roots in the lakefront community as deep as those of Petersen, who had spent his boyhood enjoying its spring-fed waters before moving on to Harvard University and a career in corporate law.
But when they heard about Petersen’s plan to invite tourists into their secluded enclave, neighbors he had known for much of his life turned against him. They accused him of engineering a tax dodge. They complained that he easily could have sold the property to another wealthy owner while still preserving it from the wrecking ball. They said he was selfishly glorifying his family at the expense of other families around him.
Petersen spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly to fend off a 10-year legal offensive highlighted by a week-long jury trial that he won, though litigation continued on other fronts. In the early going, he allegedly paid a bribe to get the legislature to approve his proposed museum, prompting opponents to make competing donations for scrapping the project, according to charges that led to a politician’s guilty plea in the case.
There were personal setbacks as well. Pancreatic cancer claimed Petersen’s wife in 2003, then Parkinson’s disease slowed him down and put a frustrating stutter in his speech. But he remained undeterred. “You just decide you’re going to do something,” he explains simply.
At the bleakest moments, he was buoyed by thoughts of his late mother, Alma. “She loved the place. She wanted it saved,” says Petersen, now 80. “Mother wanted it to be a museum.”
The years of conflict took a toll, says neighbor and museum supporter Dick Lamb. “He could have made a lot of money selling it. To go through these battles to give it away, that would take it out of anybody. The effort that it has taken for him to bring it to this point was superhuman.”
John Notz, a close friend for nearly 50 years, believes the struggle changed Petersen. Cautious and conservative by nature, he became more suspicious and withdrawn after people he had counted on for support turned against him. “It was personal from the get-go,” Notz says. “He’s a different human being as a result of it. He’s much less forthcoming in his dealings with others.”
Shortly before the museum opened in June, Petersen walked the grounds in work boots, a canvas hat covering his wispy white hair, looking more like a caretaker than scion of the wealthy founding family. Though he tried not to let it show, he was fretting about the slow progress of the state-run renovation.
Petersen has sweated the details for years now, says Bill O’Connor, the Madison lawyer who helped him shepherd the project through legislation, litigation and zoning battles. “I don’t think anyone has a better grasp of all these threads,” he says.
Naturally, Petersen wants the museum to reflect his memories of Black Point. The home’s greatest appeal is that almost nothing changed over the course of his lifetime, from the sweeping porch to the lookout tower to the Victorian-era furnishings. It was strictly a summer “cottage” in 1888, and so it remains today, with no central heat and no kitchen in the main house.
Still, its fix-up turned out to be a massive undertaking. Faced with costly litigation and an annual property tax bill of nearly $60,000, Petersen had deferred major maintenance projects. If Black Point couldn’t be preserved as a museum, he had vowed to tear it down and divide the seven-acre property into half a dozen lots for multimillion-dollar homes.
When Wisconsin finally took over the estate in 2005, it inherited a long list of chores and an anxious donor. Petersen worried that the days before its public unveiling might be his last, best chance to spruce up the place: “If we don’t do certain things now, they will never get done.”
Yet the impulse to sweep up the messes and slap on a coat of paint runs counter to the step-by-step planning required to restore a historic property. A few weeks before the opening, the Conrad Schmitt Studios of Milwaukee set up a microscope on the porch where Petersen’s ancestors had relaxed more than a century ago, its analyst taking pains to uncover the original colors embedded in tiny paint samples from the house.
The attention to detail ensures a historically accurate result, though it can take years to complete, says Daniel Stephans, the Wisconsin Department of Administration architect supervising the project. He helped oversee the state Capitol renovation in Madison, a job that took a dozen years. “You want it done right,” he says.
The state has a lot invested so far, including $1.7 million for repairs. The renovation started with the basics: chimneys tuck-pointed, a new roof nailed down, gutters and downspouts replaced. A crane tore off the fourth-floor tower and fitted a partial replica in its place. Some 60 percent of the ornate railings and balustrades turned out to be rotted. A dock for the tour boats had to be built, with a stairway winding 90 feet up to the house.
The choice of exterior paint made the most startling difference. Instead of the drab cream color of more recent vintage, the mansion got a brighter shade now known as “Black Point Gold,” with jaunty red-and-green trim. When Petersen saw it, he knew the state had got it right: “I did remember,” he says.
But far more is yet to be done: weather-proofing the windows, trimming the trees, leveling the brick sidewalks. A path around the lakeshore, eroded and unsafe, could cost millions to fix. And that’s just the outside of the house.
The inside has a low priority, and it shows. Just weeks before the museum’s opening, the contents were a jumble. Mattresses in the home’s 13 bedrooms were tipped on their sides; an antique music box sat on a table next to a paperback copy of “The Bourne Identity”; a nylon golf umbrella stood beside an intricately carved grandfather clock. Naked mannequins, destined to wear period attire, were piled in a heap. “The nudist colony,” Petersen called them, disdainfully.
Sooner or later, everything dating after 1938, the home’s 50th anniversary, will be removed. All but a couple of bathrooms will go, for instance, making way for restoring the bedrooms to their original spacious dimensions–but not this year.
As preparations for the opening chugged along, Black Point’s neighbors were getting ready for the summer season in their own fashion. At a sleek contemporary house next door, a maintenance worker noisily power-washed the swimming pool, even as the paint analyst peeled back the layers of time on Black Point’s veranda.
Driving his maroon Volvo station wagon down the familiar winding roads to Daddy Maxwell’s diner for lunch, Petersen passed dozens of homes, some old, many new, but to his way of thinking, all were divided into two varieties: those whose owners had taken his side in the museum dispute, and those who had opposed him. Passing the properties of his supporters, he would nod to their homes approvingly, saying, “They’re with us. They’re with us.”
DENISE SHELDON, WHO OWNS 11 acres not far from Black Point, is most emphatically not with him. And she’s sick of being told that all she wants is to keep the have-nots from seeing what the haves have in their little slice of paradise.
She and her husband own a landscaping company, and it’s hard work. They built the business and invested the profits in this pretty spot free of noise and congestion, which is exactly how they want to keep it. “Then we’re being told we’re being exclusive. We’re being snobs. We don’t want the common folk. No! This is what we worked and saved for,” she explains. ” I take that very personally. I wasn’t raised with a silver spoon. . . . We were told we should just lay down and take it.”
Instead, Sheldon and other neighbors raised a hefty war chest to fight back. By the time the Wisconsin Court of Appeals finally disposed of a last-ditch claim in 2005, the group had spent $300,000 in legal fees, she estimates.
Opponents took the litigation route only after Petersen refused to bend, she says. “He was very dismissive. Very pacifying. ‘Oh, it will be fine. Don’t worry.’ We sure didn’t get a lot of answers. When we kept asking questions, he became lock-lipped. You can’t do it to the exclusion of the people surrounding this property.”
In retrospect, she’s proud of maintaining her dignity throughout the ordeal, though she regrets the mud slung at Petersen by some of her allies, and she’s still uneasy about the public corruption she witnessed.
Black Point became Exhibit A in a scandal involving a former state Senate majority leader, Chuck Chvala, whose 20-count indictment in 2002 accused him of working both sides of the controversy to obtain illicit campaign contributions.
It started in 1997 when a joint finance committee approved funding to turn the home into a museum. Chvala allegedly told Petersen’s lobbyist that if he wanted the measure to keep progressing, “his people” had better contribute $500 apiece to a pair of Chvala’s favored candidates. Petersen paid, according to the indictment, and the legislation passed.
Then in 1999 and 2000, opponents of the project started sending checks to Chvala’s favorites, the indictment alleged, and a repeal of the Black Point funding made it to the governor’s desk, where it finally was vetoed. Chvala, a Democrat, pleaded guilty to two felonies in 2005 and received a nine-month sentence.
The charges involving Black Point were dismissed in the plea deal, and Chvala’s lawyer, John Olson, claims they were bogus all along. Both sides made campaign contributions, but not at Chvala’s explicit direction, he asserts, adding that the project “slipped in under the radar” at first, and Chvala later turned against it after recognizing its drawbacks. So it was a “bitter pill,” Olson says, when the brouhaha surrounding the mansion became the lead count of Chvala’s indictment, which shocked a state known for good government: “He was surprised at all the attention it did get.”
Sheldon says she was surprised, too, that a mansion could inspire such hardball politics. “I had no idea that with an issue like this, people would go to that extent, but that was a lesson I learned,” she says. “People will go to that extent to get something they really want.”
When the dust cleared, the museum plan had survived the scandal, but not unchanged. The neighbors who fought the project take comfort in the restrictions they won on its use, particularly since the original plan would have encouraged visitors to drive into their neighborhood at will. Plus, the years of delay represented their own reward, as Sills notes: “We achieved something of a victory, in that this is now 2007.”
FROM THE LONG PERSPECTIVE of Black Point’s history, that delay amounts to only a brief interlude. In a sense, the mansion got its start when the Chicago Fire of 1871 wiped out most of the city while leaving unscathed the South Side brewery belonging to Petersen’s great-grandfather.
In the aftermath, Conrad Seipp told the Chicago Daily Tribune that he felt honor-bound to help those who, unlike him, were left in no position to capitalize on the thirsty work of rebuilding. “I always think when I see a poor fellow in the street, if he is to all appearances an honest man, maybe somebody has made money out of his misfortune. And if he chances to come to me, I can’t turn him away.”
In the years to come, the German immigrant’s descendants would amass an impressive record of philanthropy, using Black Point for some of their charity-minded events.
But first, Seipp set about turning his beer factory into a money machine. He invested in mechanical refrigeration, shipped barrels of lager widely around the region and later put the brand name on calendars, match boxes, coasters and serving trays. He locked up real estate around newly opened racetracks for his company-owned saloons, according to the American Breweriana Journal, and zeroed in on niche markets such as the fast-growing city’s booming bordellos. The family fortune grew.
Attracted to Lake Geneva in the wake of the fire, Seipp snapped up 28 acres of prime shoreline property in 1887. Construction of his summer cottage began right away, and architect Adolph Cudell adorned it with the decorative features typical of the times: He etched the brewer’s monogram onto the beveled glass of the vestibule doors and put stained glass in the curved staircase leading to the lookout tower. He installed a massive fireplace surrounded by glazed tiles showing a child deep in a Latin lesson. The steeply pitched gable roofs, high ceilings and tall windows provided grand scale.
At the same time, the Seipps were building a castle-like home, now long gone, at 3300 S. Michigan Ave. That project cost a princely $250,000, while Black Point clocked in at $20,000, the lower price befitting its more relaxed purpose. “This was not built as a showplace,” says Petersen of Black Point. “This was built as a big family home. It was supposed to be a country house.”
The Victorian furnishings from the Seipps’ previous Chicago homestead, considered out of style, made their way by barge and horse-drawn wagon to Black Point. The secondhand furniture has become one of the museum’s proudest features, as intact collections from so long ago have become exceedingly rare.
Weakened by diabetes, Seipp died of pneumonia in 1890, just two years after completing his rural retreat. Changes to the property came only occasionally after that. And though the farm country around Black Point sprouted homes, life at the mansion stayed remarkably consistent, summer after summer.
It’s captured nicely in a 66-page gift book published last year after the museum’s legal hurdles were safely cleared. The photographic record shows guests flocking to the house in large numbers from its earliest days.
One tinted photo shows men in dark suits, their ladies in flared skirts and long dresses beside them, lugging suitcases from the train depot at Williams Bay to the Seipps’ private steamboat for transport to Black Point. A sepia-toned portrait from 1903 captures the well-fed members of a German choral society standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the Black Point lawn, the house behind them looking just as it does today.
The book also contains personal photos showing Petersen as a child in a 1930s bathing suit, then a few years later wearing a coat and tie with his relatives in a family orchestra. Another image catches the moment when a pair of boys manhandled a reluctant goat into position for the photographer, with the caption: “Each child at Black Point was expected to raise a goat of his or her own.”
The house kept an easy rhythm almost unknown to city dwellers today. “People ran their lives totally differently,” says Notz, Petersen’s longtime friend, who has visited Black Point since the 1960s. “It was hard getting around. No cell phones. You had a much more rested life. You could reflect on your life.”
TARA BLAZER REMEMBERS driving to her vacation home near Black Point several years ago, and wondering about the strange yellow signs that had gone up in the neighborhood: “NO PETERSEN MUSEUM,” they said, with a red circle and slash through them. “I thought to myself, ‘Who wouldn’t want a museum?’ “
Blazer hails from Rockford, where among other accomplishments she dramatically expanded Midway Village, a living-history museum that re-creates a typical rural town at the end of the 19th Century. Now, as executive director of Black Point, her task will be building the new museum into a popular attraction in a state that has wrestled with declining attendance at other historic sites it owns.
Across the country, hundreds of “house museums” are struggling amid competition from flashier tourist destinations. With money tight, these time capsules are under pressure to earn their keep or go back into private hands.
Colonial Williamsburg, the granddaddy of living-history museums, announced plans last year to sell a plantation called Carter’s Grove. Earlier, a foundation that operated the boyhood home of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee sparked an outcry by selling it to a couple for use as a private residence. Along Geneva Lake, the University of Chicago has stirred controversy with a proposal to sell its Yerkes Observatory to a New York spa developer. As of May, local resistance had stalled the deal.
Thanks to state taxpayers, Black Point rests on a firmer financial footing than many other privately operated historic homes. Wisconsin is providing a $1.8 million endowment in addition to the public funds used for repairs. That nest egg will cover almost half the museum’s $152,000 annual operating budget. Blazer is counting on admission fees and gift-shop sales to make up at least part of the difference, and that means attracting visitors.
To do that, historic sites are starting to take their guests beyond the rudimentary tour. The state-owned Old World Wisconsin living-history museum, for instance, has set out to reverse a long decline partly by running workshops on spinning cloth, weaving baskets and hammering metal at its blacksmith shop. In its “Rousing with the Roosters” program, families pay $80 to arrive at 6:30 a.m., perform farm chores, fix breakfast on a wood-burning stove, then clean up and go.
“People are going to be looking for experiences and not just a visit,” says Alicia Goehring of the Wisconsin Historical Society, a state agency that owns 10 sites, including Circus World in Baraboo and the Villa Louis mansion in Prairie du Chien.
Blazer remembers big crowds turning out for the Civil War re-enactments she staged in Rockford, and she envisions Victorian-style teas on the Black Point veranda and John Philip Sousa band concerts on its lawn during 4th of July weekends. Yet all the restrictions will sharply restrict such ambitions, and no one is quite certain how the museum will adapt.
Lake Geneva Cruise Line already has a plan for handling its bigger charters. First, a loaded boat will cruise from the Riviera Docks downtown to the Black Point pier, then off-load the maximum number of 47 guests for an abbreviated tour. The remaining passengers will stay aboard for a spin around the lake before returning to the pier, where they will disembark for their mini-tour while the first group re-boards.
Harold Friestad, the cruise line’s general manager and a civic activist, knows his limits: “The chief thing is to respect the neighbors,” he says. “They pay big taxes to live on the lake, and you have to respect that.” Indeed, property values have soared in recent years, and lakefront homes routinely command seven-figure prices.
As of this spring, tourists were showing some early interest in visiting Black Point, and Friestad’s cruise line was booking charters and taking reservations well before the museum opened. But the excursion is not cheap. The standard adult fee of $32 is unusually steep for a state-funded facility, and Blazer expects the planned tour-bus option to be only somewhat less expensive. “We need to pay one way or another to transport people,” she says. “People can’t just drive up in the car.”
Once bus service starts, neighbor Daryl Braun worries that residents strolling on the narrow country roads still could be at risk, a long-standing concern for folks like himself who opposed the museum from the start: “There will be a watchful eye on the Black Point Museum,” he vows.
Sheldon, for one, hopes the tour boats catch on, since she considers those the least invasive form of access. And they were, after all, the original way to reach the grand lake homes: “If you really want to get into the moment, come by boat.”
Meantime, she and others will keep a lookout for any attempt to weaken the condition-filled permit that governs use of the museum. “I am concerned it could be altered to allow for evening parties and longer hours. It puts us in a position of having to be a watchdog in our own back yard,” she says. “We like it peaceful. That’s why we moved here. That’s why we paid these real-estate prices.”
Sheldon is taking other precautions, too. She took over a seat on the Linn Township Plan Commission, a key stop for any permit changes. And she hasn’t forgotten the most important lesson she learned in the decade-long tussle: Don’t take your neighborhood for granted.
“You need to stay involved. Be alert,” she says. “We all settle into our own cocoons. You need to keep in touch with your neighbors.”
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gburns@tribune.com
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