77 Square's primer for Madison newcomers
It's said that Madison is 77 square miles surrounded by reality -- here's what you'll find inside our borders
World War II had Normandy. Alfred Hitchcock had "The Birds." A small town called Woodstock had all those hippies.
In Madison, we have the fall, when a blast of new people come to the city in what can sometimes seem like an invasion.
Each August, upwards of 10,000 newcomers arrive here if you break down UW-Madison enrollment to be about 6,000 freshmen, 1,200 transfer students and 2,000 graduate students. That doesn't count new university staff, or the approximately 3,000 other people who move to the Madison area each year, too.
So this is the time to get to know each other a little bit. We don't know you, but you probably don't know us that well either.
If you're from a bigger city or the coasts, you might think we're all a bunch of polka-dancing rubes who raise cows in our backyards. Or if you're from a small town, you (or, more accurately, your parents) might be worried that you just moved into some township that's tucked in between Sodom and Gomorrah.
If that sounds like a huge contradiction, so be it. We're a city of contradictions, so get used to it now.
Here in Madison, it seems that everyone was born here and lived here their whole lives. Unless of course, they came from far, far away.
We're a city where people pride themselves about buying local, but then act like twittering tweens at a Hannah Montana concert when a national retailer such as Trader Joe's come to town.
Yes, the city leans decidedly to the left in politics, but one of the city's most popular radio hosts is a conservative (WIBA's Vicki McKenna).
And it's a place with a pervasive drinking culture, yet you can't buy alcohol to carry out after 9 p.m.
So nothing really is as it seems here, even if some things seem obvious.
All we can do is provide you with some kind of primer. In return, you and your fresh eyes remind us what is good about this place that is so familiar, we don't always stop to notice the details.
The geography
Madison is a city that is defined by east and west. That isn't to say there isn't a north or south; in fact, people who live on those sides are probably rightly frustrated by the east-west obsession.
But there is a historic precedent for the divide. In the early part of the 20th century, city leaders wanted to attract industry but residents didn't want to disturb the character of the west side and the university. So a compromise was made to put industry on the east side. That helped create a more working-class east side. That doesn't hold completely true today, but it is part of the city's psyche.
When Dan Bannan and his wife, Elena Bender, moved here from Phoenix in May so she could attend graduate school, he heard it a different way.
"Someone told me the west side is the yuppies and the east side is the hippies," he said.
It's sort of hard to argue with that if you walk down Willy Street (officially Williamson Street) on the near east side or go to the Willy Street Co-op grocery store. Still, it's not the only area in the city where independent restaurants or businesses thrive. Some are even on the west side, such as on Monroe Street.
Even the south side has a strip of ethnic restaurants on Park Street. And the north side has Warner Park, home of the wildly popular Mallards baseball team, and Troy Gardens, a neighborhood project of green-built housing, an organic farm and restored prairie and woodlands. That all shows that the stereotype is not completely accurate.
But to talk about geography in Madison is to throw out one word: isthmus. This simply isn't a word used in conversation most other places, but here it's the core of the city: the land between lakes Monona and Mendota.
Getting around
All the lakes and that isthmus can make for tough orientation.
Tim Sauers, the Overture Center's new director of education and community engagement, came here from Chicago, where everything is on a grid.
"I'm still Mapquesting everything," Sauers said. "And you have all those streets that just change."
Here, a street like Williamson turns into Winnebago and Eastwood, then splits off into Atwood Avenue and then Monona Drive as it goes around Lake Monona. Regent Street turns into Proudfit Street for no discernible reason. East Washington Avenue actually goes due northeast. Then the State Capitol pops up in the middle of everything and forces all sorts of one-way streets. A bird's-eye view of some of the triangular-shaped intersections probably looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Not exactly user-friendly.
"I still can't drive. Some of the intersections are just too much," Bender said. "I still don't know where the Beltline is, but that's OK."
There is no trick to it, you just have to memorize it all. But you can do one of three things: get on a bike, get on a bus or get lost.
"It's easy because you've got the Capitol in the middle," Sauers said. "I just drive and get lost and find my way back."
At a slower pace, the city makes a little more sense. That's where all those bikes come in to play. The city seems to have a bike shop on every corner, and there are many miles of bike paths.
Bannan and Bender were thrilled that they could ditch one of their cars and get around by bike. Michelle Brownstein, who moved here from Washington, D.C., in late July to join her boyfriend and go to grad school, said she is still amazed to be in a city that has bike lanes, and drivers who are used to looking out for bicycles.
Who we are
Apparently, we are nice here. That's not bragging; that's what the newcomers say.
Brownstein noticed this when she tried to get a Wisconsin driver's license.
"Even the DMV people were smiling and nice," she said. "They told me I couldn't get a license yet, but they were nice when they told me. I wanted to say, 'Do you realize you work at the DMV?' I didn't think anybody was nice at the DMV."
Sauers had to take his car in to get serviced and a part didn't arrive on time. The mechanics called him to tell him the part didn't arrive. The next day, they called again and apologized. When it still hadn't arrived, they called again and apologized profusely.
"They kept apologizing, and all I could think was that if I was back in Chicago, my car would have sat there for a week and nobody would have called me to tell me anything," Sauers said.
You'll find that with some other services, too. The recycling rules are specific and endless, but chances are that after living here a while, you'll know the name of the city's helpful recycling coordinator, George Dreckmann, as well as that of your landlord or alderperson.
Home, sweet home
Maybe we're this nice because this is our home and always has been.
"Nobody is from Phoenix," Bender said. "Here, everybody we know was born here or born here, left and came back. It's good. I like the sense of community."
Grad student Brownstein noticed that, too -- a stark difference coming from the nation's capital.
"I've been living in a city where no one plans to stay," she said. "Here, the people I've met are planning to live here a long time. They have kids and parents and pets here. It's a place designed to be home."
The culture isn't that difficult to figure
out. There's so much free stuff around the city, particularly
music, that it's not hard to get out and mix with the
natives.
And for a shortcut to what are our traditions, sample the menu at the Old Fashioned on the Capitol Square, which spotlights Wisconsin fare with a hip twist.
So dive in, eat some cheese, dance on top of the Monona Terrace, wander around a downtown that's even lively at night, and freeze in February, just like the rest of us.
By then, you might even be able to figure out how to get around town.
The links
How Madison turns on, tunes in and logs on
7 havens for Madison fine arts
7 ways to have mad fun
in the Mad City
- Peterson to plead guilty in Marino murder
- Overture to cut 15 jobs, make big programming changes
- Former assistant fire chief Carl Saxe dies at 55
- Vets Museum director Richard Zeitlin dies at 63
- Wrapper's delight: A Madison gift-giver's guide
- After 30+ years, parks department's Si Widstrand calls it a career
