Watertower (Fruin)
public art work by artist Tom Fruin
Watertower is a public art work by artist Tom Fruin. It is located just south of downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin on top of the seven-story Coakley Brothers Company warehouse in the Walker's Point neighborhood.
Description
Watertower is a sculpture made of multicolored Plexiglas panels assembled in a frame of welded steel in the form of a water tower. The sculpture's form references the once-common rooftop water tanks, most of which were removed decades ago. Sunlight illuminates the artwork by day, and interior lights make it highly visible at night. Fruin salvages the Plexiglas used in his sculptures.
Commissioning process
Coakley Brothers CEO Peggy Coakley commissioned the artwork for the rooftop of her family business after viewing a similar work by Fruin during a visit to New York. This is the artist's sixth water tower. The artwork is part of a $6 million renovation of the Coakley warehouse.
“Watertower (Fruin)” enters the record as public art work by artist Tom Fruin. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Watertower, Fruin and public can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48792957. Authority coordinates are 43.027, -87.916. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Watertower (Fruin)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.