Now active with pedestrians and cyclists, the Beerline Trail is partially situated on an industrial corridor and what was once a busy rail line for Milwaukee’s beer industry.
MKE FreshAir Collective, a local nonprofit that monitors air quality, is adding four solar-powered air quality sensors along the Beerline Trail with support from Riverworks Development Corp.
Riverworks serves the Harambee and Riverwest neighborhoods and maintains the city’s north portion of the Beerline.
The air quality project is supported by $15,000 of a $100,000 grant from the Daybreak Fund to Riverworks to offer community education and enhance the gateway park and greenery along the trail by adding bioswales, rain gardens, native plantings and trees.
“It made a lot of sense for us to support it, because why wouldn’t we want to know about air quality in our neighborhoods?” said Ruth Weill, community development manager for Riverworks.
Sensor info
The collective’s sensors measure different sizes of particulate matter and carbon dioxide and convert the concentrations into a level between 0 to 500 on the U.S. Air Quality Index, with 0 being the least harmful for human health. This data can be accessed in real time by residents before they go outside.
MKE FreshAir Collective installed one new sensor in June in Harambee near the Beerline Trail and Kuumba Juice & Coffee, 274 E. Keefe Ave., and is looking for more feedback from residents on the other three locations.
“They know where industry is running a lot of trucks, they know where things are burning or whatever, exhaust, where I don’t necessarily innately know that,” Verdin said.
MKE FreshAir Collective plans to conduct outreach at different events before the sensors go up by September, according to Verdin.
Part of the challenge is to find spots that are not clustered too close together along the Beerline Trail, which extends southeast from Capitol Drive and Third Street, crosses into Gordon Park at Locust Street and follows the Milwaukee River until Kilbourn Reservoir Park and Kadish Park.
The City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County are designing a 1.8-mile extension that will run northwest through the Rufus King and Garden Homes neighborhoods to the new trail on 20th Street.
A growing network
The collective continues to expand its network of sensors outside the Beerline. It added one in Harambee at Solomon Community Temple UMC, 3295 N. Martin Luther King Drive, in May.
The church hosts meetings of the Harambee Eco Neighborhood Initiative and planted 26 trees and 56 shrubs last year on its property. The nearby Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School is also working on adding 80 trees to soak up stormwater and create more shade.
Katharine Goray, who is a member of the church and its project outreach coordinator, said she had conversations for a long time about air quality and high asthma rates in children before presenting the idea of getting a sensor to the church board for approval.
“We wanted to know what the air quality is right now, and if the trees and plants make a difference, say, three to five years from now,” Goray said.
She said it would also be helpful to determine if Solomon’s children’s program should avoid outdoor activity on poor air quality days.
While MKE FreshAir Collective’s data reports that Harambee experiences better air quality than most neighborhoods, the sensor is located on the south end of the neighborhood, not by the church or the trail.
“If there’s an issue, we’ll have actual data to try to figure out where it’s coming from,” Weill said.
New air quality report
MKE FreshAir Collective released its 2025 air quality report with Data You Can Use at the end of May that contains neighborhood-level data.
The report found there were 20 wildfire smoke days with an air quality alert issued last year, and 21 days when at least one sensor’s daily average AQI was over 100 or classified as “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.”
To learn more
Contact MKE FreshAir Collective at reachout@mkefreshaircollective.com. Attend a workshop on building do-it-yourself Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to filter indoor air at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, July 16 at Solomon Community Temple UMC.
To access neighborhood air quality data in real time, download the AirVisual app by IQAir or view the map here.
Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
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