I had a chance to sit down with Tim Metcalfe tonight to talk about his ideas for Olin-Turville Park and the broader area around the Alliant Energy Center. I’m a slow writer and probably won’t finish all of my thoughts for a few days, but I wanted to draw people’s attention to the public meeting being held Saturday, March 19th 2011 at 10am at the Alliant Energy Center.
The Wisconsin State Journal wrote about it a few weeks back, and and Neil Heinen devoted one of his Sunday morning shows to the project. The project also has a basic website. This image should help jog your memory:
Anyway, more about this project later – there’s a lot to like, and also some concerns. However, I’d encourage you to go to the meeting on Saturday. The presentation that Tim and the rest of the task force has worked out does a better job of describing what some of the concepts are than what has appeared in the press, and many of my big questions were answered.
In a only casually-related issue, as Tim and others were describing how as a city we should be really treating the Monona Lakeshore and causeway much more as a parkfront, a little newsitem I had read a few weeks back went off in my head. The city has apparently floated the idea of potentially moving Rhythm and Booms out of Warner Park this year, because of construction headaches with Packers/Highway 113. (That news came out the same day as Walker announced his Budget Repair bill, so you might have missed it. It’s also possible that Warner Park is now a done deal for 2011, I haven’t heard.) So, in the probably-a-bad-idea department: what if we did R&B over Lake Monona, and had the main audience watch along John Nolen Drive?
So here’s the crazy idea*: treat it as a Ride-the-Drive event day, with John Nolen shut down to traffic. In fact, maybe it is the same day as Ride The Drive, at least on a smaller scale. If the fireworks are over Lake Monona, John Nolen Drive is a long stretch of great viewing opportunities, along with Olin Park, Brittingham Park, Law Park, Monona Terrace, and Olbrich Park. John Nolen is divided, so we can easily use one side for busses to get people out of the area and the other for spectators. It energizes downtown afterwards, and gives more of an opportunity for people to trickle out. If there’s a way to do bigger parking somewhere, it might be easier to get people to the Beltline and to E Washington Avenue and on their way out of town. The logistics of how R&B would work over Lake Monona can’t be much harder than how it might work if the North Side of Madison is completely under reconstruction.
Most importantly, though, it really has us use the Nolen Causeway and Lake Monona Shore as “The Front Porch of the City.” Let’s sit out there one night and see if we like it.
*I was happy to discover I was not the first person with this idea, which makes me think it’s a little less crazy.
