A 20-foot lighthouse that once leaned dangerously toward the main house has been rebuilt at the Milwaukee Boat House, the boat-shaped East Side landmark at 3138 N. Cambridge Ave. that has spent more than a century turning heads. The reconstruction, finished this summer, caps a project that began when the tower's decades-old repairs finally failed and threatened to topple onto the historic structure it was meant to complement.
The story of how the lighthouse came back dates to July 2021, when owner Steven Tilton filed an emergency application with Milwaukee's Historic Preservation Commission to dismantle the original tower after it began leaning toward the residence, according to Urban Milwaukee. The tower had to be stabilized with scaffolding and bracing while the city weighed what to do next. As the outlet later reported, past repairs using styrofoam and stucco, added by former owner William Kortsch, had made it impossible to simply straighten the original structure, and the commission formally approved a full demolition and reconstruction in June 2022.
Designing the replacement fell to Claire Hitchcock Tilton, the architectural designer and daughter of Steven Tilton, who took on the lighthouse as her first professional project after graduating from UW-Milwaukee with an architecture degree, according to TMJ4 News. She said she struggled to find someone able to recreate the tower's early-20th-century appearance before turning to neighbor Pete Brands to actually build it. The rebuilt lighthouse, finished in summer 2026, was constructed to resemble its 1920s original look, complete with a climbable ladder — though TMJ4 notes it's too narrow for everyone to fit through — and a working light at the top. The whole rebuild took about a year.
A Boat on Dry Land Since 1922
The lighthouse is only the latest chapter for a property that has never behaved like an ordinary house. Edmund B. Gustorf, who worked as district manager for Milwaukee Tank Works, a manufacturer of gasoline station equipment during the automotive boom of the 1910s and 1920s, built the structure in 1922 on a vacant lot next to his primary residence, according to research compiled by Urban Milwaukee. Per the Wisconsin Historical Society, Gustorf had a Green Bay shipyard precut the house's pieces and, with help from a Green Bay shipwright, assembled them on site atop a concrete basement, modeling the whole thing after a 1910 gasoline motor launch boat. He reportedly named the finished house Landlubber.
The result is a 72-foot-long, 18-foot-wide structure with aluminum siding forming its hull and wood paneling forming its cabin, dressed up with portholes, life preservers, and running lights, per TMJ4. Gustorf also added the original miniature lighthouse with a rotating beacon to the front lawn. The Milwaukee Historic Preservation Commission described the building in a 1985 report as a unique expression of early 20th-century fantasy architecture and identified it as the only known boat house of its kind in Wisconsin, a classification the city cited when it landmarked the property on December 20, 1985, under the formal name Edmund Gustorf House.
Saved From the Wrecking Ball Before
That 1985 designation wasn't just ceremonial. Neighborhood dentist William E. Kortsch bought the boat house that same year specifically to keep it from being demolished and replaced with condominiums, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Kortsch had grown up nearby and remembered watching his grandfather pour the concrete for the house's basement decades earlier. The building has since passed through four owners and served at different times as a primary residence, a rental, and now an Airbnb.
Steven Tilton bought the boat house from his neighbor in 2018 after living in the Cambridge Woods neighborhood for roughly 40 years, per TMJ4's report. He and co-owner Nola Hitchcock Cross put $40,000 into initial restoration work before officially opening it as an Airbnb rental in February 2019, according to Riverwest Currents, which noted the pair had lived down the street for more than 30 years before the purchase. Tilton put the current effort in similar terms, saying the lighthouse project felt like an investment in the community and calling the boat house and its tower monuments to imagination and whimsy.
Inside the 550-Square-Foot Vessel
Inside, the roughly 550-square-foot layout places a bedroom in the bow, a dining area in the stern, and a living room and galley in the hull, decorated with Great Lakes nautical charts, according to WUWM. TMJ4 reports the property now has two bedrooms and two baths and resembles a vintage motor yacht from the outside. City tax records assessed the property's total value at $220,100 for 2025, with land valued at $102,900 and improvements at $117,200 — a jump from the $190,000 Tilton paid when he bought it in May 2018.
Like other short-term rentals in the city, the boat house operates under Milwaukee's Tourist Rooming House licensing rules, which require a $300 inspection fee and a $110 annual renewal along with compliance with local health and zoning codes. Tilton has said he wants to keep the boat house well maintained and plans to continue running it as an Airbnb, keeping a 104-year-old oddity on the Milwaukee River corridor open to overnight guests rather than shutting it away as a private curiosity.
