Through a tour of the recently renovated The Powerhouse, the Greater Wausau Chamber’s project that aims to be a business innovation center, Chamber President/CEO Dave Eckmann points at numbers written in marker on a wood beam.
Those were instructions for the demolition team for how to go about dismantling the more-than-a-century-old building roughly seven years ago.
On two different occasions, in fact, the former WPS power house building was nearly torn down. Last Wednesday, the Chamber hosted its first event, a seminar on powering innovation in marketing, the first of many and varied planned uses for the building.
The roughly $1.4 million first phase of the project came out of one of three recommended projects from TIP Strategies, a consulting firm whose report release this reporter covered back at City Pages. When a consultant saw the former WPS power house building and learned it was going to be torn down, he suggested immediately that instead they save it.
It was one of three strategies TIP recommended. The others included building Rib Mountain into more of a year-round destination; and transforming downtown.
That was eight years ago. Today, new housing projects are built and being built in downtown. Development of new uses and projects in Rib Mountain State Park has been slow to get off the ground, save for mountain biking, for which land is being bought currently. But the plans are laid.
The Powerhouse’s opening is the realization of the third strategy TIP pointed out.
But what exactly is it intended to be?
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Building innovation
Eckmann describes The Powerhouse as an innovation center, but what exactly does that mean? I pressed Eckmann to lay out the framework for me.
The chief aim of The Powerhouse, which will have Chamber-only and public elements, is to serve as a hub for business innovation — that means bringing business leaders together to share ideas, bring ideas back to their businesses and learn from each other and from experts in the field.
Eckmann says the Chamber plans to draw on a broad network of outside resources, including the Central Wisconsin AI Center, Northcentral Technical College, UW-Stevens Point and UW-Stout, along with connections he has made through the University Economic Development Association and universities including Notre Dame and Indiana. Especially important, Eckmann says, is the Wisconsin Technology Council, which generally didn’t operate much outside of the Madison area.
The Powerhouse can give the Wisconsin Technology Council a stronger presence in Wausau, Eckmann says, bringing some of the expertise, businesses and investment connections centered around Madison into central Wisconsin.
But the Chamber also has more plans than that. The space includes a podcast studio and storytelling space, offices that can be rented by small firms, and the space upstairs where the innovation programs are held can also be rented as event space for businesses, or even weddings.
And anyone can come in and pay $20 per day to use it as a co-working space for the day, with coffee and wifi. The hope is the space will help foster connections between entrepreneurs, build mentorships and share ideas.
“What’s more important is to make sure we are building an innovation ecosystem in Wausau,” Eckmann told The Wausonian. “[Right now] we don’t have it.”
The aim is for the space to power the next generation of entrepreneurs. Much like the building originally powered the streetcars when they first ran from Wausau to Rothschild.
A Powerhouse of history
The powerhouse was built in 1904 as part of Wausau’s emerging electrical and transportation infrastructure. Mark Ewing, one of the key figures behind the Wausau Street Railway, helped lead that era of development. Ewing, who later served as the Chamber’s first president, along with Neal Brown ran the street car enterprise that connected Wausau to the paper mills in Rothschild.
Wausau Paper later relocated its headquarters to the building in 1984, Eckmann told The Wausonian. A lot of the wood and structure from those offices have been preserved in the construction of the current facility, with Samuels Group handling the contracting and employing mostly local contractors who are also Chamber members.
Eckmann says workers from those enterprises took a lot of pride in working on the project.
“It’s just the talent that people hold, but when you see them, and the meticulous nature of some of the detail work that they do, it’s incredible,” Eckmann says. “I have a deep, profound, a newfound respect for the trades and the people that do that work.”
When the Wausau Chamber decided it wanted to preserve the building, it was nearly going to be torn down. Because of federal regulations, WPS can’t actually sell the building. So the Chamber agreed to make WPS whole for the money they’d already spent on demolition until it could develop a lease agreement for the property. They ended up buying the Washington Street train depot and using it as the Chamber’s headquarters, which granted them access to The Powerhouse parking lot behind it.
In April 2025, the Chamber was nearly ready to give the building back to WPS — it didn’t have the money to complete the project. Eckmann told The Wausonian it was one of the more challenging times in his life.
But a mentor told him to do something that doesn’t always come easy to many of us: ask for help. One came and pledged, and then another, until he ultimately had enough to secure the vision.
“I came back to the board, and I said, I got half of the money we need,” Eckmann told The Wausonian. “And, oh, by the way, I got another 100. And another 100. And the answer became clear: we’re going to keep it.”
Now open
After eight years and two near-deaths for the building, The Powerhouse is ready to be unveiled. The Chamber plans to host a picnic for its members at the building on Sept. 17. A community open house, in which the public can get a view of the building and what it does, is planned for the following week. Besides learning about the building’s current purpose, QR codes will be scattered throughout, giving people various historical videos about the place.
“We want the people of this community to be able to come and look at this and experience its present and its history,” Eckmann says. “It’s bigger than the Chamber.”
In the interest of full disclosure, my fiancée is currently employed at the Greater Wausau Chamber.
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