ASHWAUBENON, Wis. — Michael Gilles is part of a crew with Captain’s Lawn Care, working to get a property a few blocks away from Lambeau Field ready before the 2025 NFL Draft next week.
As draft preparations pick up steam, the lawn care team is navigating a string of road closures in the area, including portions of main thoroughfares such as Lombardi Avenue and Oneida Street.
“Sometimes we have to go a couple blocks out of our way to get to an area. Right now, when it’s shutdown out here, we have to go way around to get to the other side of the road,” Gilles said. “It’s a lot of backstreets now. With the bigger trailer it’s harder to get through. There are spots you can’t go to.”
Even though part of Ridge Road near Lambeau Field closed over the weekend, many businesses along that stretch of Ridge Road remain open, including FrameMakers, where Hallie Langenhorst is the manager.
“We’ve been busy in the last month or so, leading up to the NFL Draft,” she said. “It’s helping a lot of local businesses and people with Packers homes, and that kind of thing. Doing some framing and getting their place of business and home ready for rental or the draft.”
Langenhorst expects store traffic to tail off as the draft gets closer.
“Our plan is to close Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the event. We’ll sell parking here in our parking lot,” she said. “The five businesses in our strip mall are getting together and we’ll sell parking here, just as a way to make up for some of the lost income of being closed for those days.”
Like Langenhorst and her team, Gilles said he and the rest of the lawn crew will just keep rolling with the changes.
“Hopefully, it will bring a lot of revenue to the area. We’ll see when it’s done,” he said. “We’ll still have to navigate probably a couple weeks after they’ve gone. We’re just going with the flow pretty much.”
