"It's just like...what is going on?" Mysterious stairway near Bradford Beach piquing curiosity

MILWAUKEE (WITI) -- If you've been to Bradford Beach lately, you may have noticed the mysterious stairway. So where, exactly do these steps take you?

First, people find the stairway and then come the questions. Some of the responses FOX6 News heard near the stairway include:

"This is the first time I noticed it. It looks nice, but I don't know what it is!"

"It's just like...what is going on?"

"They're just stairs that are randomly there!"

Indeed, it's a new set of stairs -- and the reason isn't random.

"There's a historic walkway system that's been here, that connects to the pedestrian bridge," Kevin Haley, a landscape architect with the Milwaukee County Parks Department said.

Haley says in the search for a shortcut, pedestrians would pound a path to a nearby parking lot. Then, during the floods of 2010, heavy precipitation caused problems.

"A lot of the water found its way down the path, found this weak spot that had been created, and actually cascaded through here, saturated the soil, and this whole area collapsed," Haley said.

Similar situations were discovered in other areas, including Milwaukee's Juneau Park.

So, Haley says the county applied for and received money from FEMA -- the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rebuild the bluffs.

"The native plants, very deep-rooted will come in here and establish this and make it strong again," Haley said.

Haley says FEMA covers 75 percent of the $60,000 cost to put this project in place. The rest is satisfied by state and county contributions.

"It is high-visibility, and we expect it to get a lot of traffic. Obviously, you can see, we can't even keep a safety-fence up," Haley said.

Haley says this project only requires railings, and then they'll be just about ready to open it up. He expects it to be fully-accessible within about a week. In the meantime, the orange fencing means folks are encouraged to stay off the stairs.