From a distance, Monona Terrace and the Madison skyline float like tantalizing eye candy above the water.
But up close, the lakefront is less sweet, the setting soured by the back sides of buildings and parking garages and surface lots and weeds.

The shoreline itself is largely cut off from the city above by train tracks and four-lane John Nolen Drive carrying 40,000 cars daily.

"It's a missed civic opportunity," said architect Lou Host-Jablonski, chairman of the city's Urban Design Commission.

"It's like we're saying, it doesn't matter."

Dramatic visions of how to better connect the city to the lake have been offered by revered city planner John Nolen and controversial architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Nolen envisioned a Grand Mall and Great Esplanade with trees, fountains and sculptures linking the Capitol and waterfront. Wright, in addition to his plans for Monona Terrace, saw an elegant boathouse to the east.

As recently as 2001, architect Kenton Peters, who has built three condominium projects facing the waterfront, has offered grand concepts for the lakefront. The latest called for a $50 million terraced park with restaurants, amphitheater, winter garden and more built over John Nolen Drive and the railroad tracks to the shoreline.

But it's all off the public radar — athletes and spectators here for Sunday's Ironman Wisconsin saw glimpses of the city's rough edge.

"We have the plans," said architect Tim Anderson of Schreiber-Anderson Associates, which did the site plan and landscape master plan for Monona Terrace.

"We don't have the leadership to implement the plans."

"There is a silence that I do find disconcerting," agreed author David Mollenhoff, who has written books on the city's history and Wright's dreams. "It is time to reopen the conversation and ask ourselves if we can complete this remarkable stretch of shoreline."

Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said, "This has been a part of the city that hasn't gotten much thought in the last decade or more. We've been focused on other things."

Former Mayor Paul Soglin, who led the effort to build Monona Terrace, said the city should revive the boathouse proposal, invite more designs like Peters' and encourage redevelopment southwest of the convention center.

Such interest, combined with the possibility of a commuter rail station in the corridor, make it a good time to refocus on the area, Cieslewicz said.

"It would be a tragedy and a lost opportunity if we don't take advantage of the spark coming from this," he said, suggesting potential for a task force or special committee. "

We want to nurture that. If there's community interest, I would certainly be interested in getting some good minds together."

Face of the city

The rough and unfinished lakefront is puzzling because the area has always been the face of the city.

"This shoreline, from the very beginning of Madison's history, has been the front porch of the city," Mollenhoff said. "It wasn't Mendota. It was always this shoreline." 

The slope to the shore was once lined with fine mansions and the area was used for tobogganing, sailing and rowing.

"This was a very busy and very popular recreation area," Mollenhoff said.

Over time, the lakefront had surges of "uglification" and "beautification," he said.

A seminal moment came in 1869, when railroad tracks were laid at the bottom of the hill, which brought coal burning locomotives spewing soot that pushed elite residents elsewhere.

Eventually, fishing shacks dotted the waterline and sewage tainted the water, prompting formation of the Madison Improvement Association.

In 1893, the association hired the 26-year-old Wright to design a modest boathouse for Lake Mendota, which was built but razed by the city in 1926, and a larger one on the east end of Law Park. The city flirted with the project as recently as the mid-1980s, but it was never built.

After the Capitol burned in 1904 and Nolen saw plans for the replacement, he unveiled plans for the Grand Mall and great Esplanade, the latter a sweeping one-mile-long park built over fill 600 feet into the lake.
Instead, in 1934, the city opened Olin Terrace, a landscaped park overlooking the lake, where Monona Terrace stands now.

At that spot, Wright initially conceived a civic center — Olin Terraces — that would connect the Capitol to the water. Wright's final design for the site came in 1959.
Options for the shoreline, however, were further limited when John Nolen Drive opened in the 1960s.

In 1979, Peters proposed building a new Madison Area Technical College Campus over the road to the lakefront, and in 1984, he altered the plan to a Lake Park Plaza — a tiered, upscale shopping center. Those went unbuilt, too.

"There's a lot of potential but it just lies fallow," Peters said.

By the time Soglin began pushing for Monona Terrace as a convention center in 1990, the shoreline had earned the label: "graveyard for visionary designs."

No sense of civic space

Despite its striking appearance and economic spinoffs, Monona Terrace doesn't connect the Capitol to the lakefront very well, and the corridor's street-level offerings are limited and the views marred, Host-Jablonski and others said.

The existing park is popular with walkers, cyclists and skaters, but there's no sense of a civic space, such as the area between Navy Pier and Millennium Park in Chicago, Host-Jablonski said.

Even small communities, such as Burlington, have better embraced their shorelines, Anderson said.
Alongside Monona Terrace, buildings are a mishmash, many bottomed with minimally screened or very visible parking garages or lots.

"There's a beautiful start down there with Monona Terrace, but it falls apart when you go under it or north or south of it," Anderson said.

One problem is that the city's design and plan commission are largely reactive bodies that don't have special design guidelines or comprehensive vision, Host-Jablonski said.

Often, developers don't volunteer to spend money for special design treatments if there's no profit incentive, he said. 

The bottom of Peter's Marina condominiums, for example, offers a garage sheathed in metal with minimal design features. Peters said he designed the building that way anticipating a terraced park would cover it.

Other back sides of buildings incorporate garage doors and trash bins.

"There's long been a sense that this is the back side, not the front side," said resident Dick Wagner, a long-time Plan Commission member now serving on the UDC. "The big leap was Monona Terrace."

The UDC, in fact, insisted on better lakeside design of the Monona Terrace Hilton Hotel.

More recently, southwest of the convention center, developer Todd McGrath has won raves for his brick and emerald glass Nolen Shore condominiums, which offers compelling design from the building's head to toe.

"I'd like to see more of that," said Ald. Mike Verveer, who represents the area. "In the future, I hope we will be more demanding."

The city, Host-Jablonski said, needs an ambitious planning process that would lay out the future look and use of the area, instead of allowing piecemeal changes.

A new comprehensive plan, he said, would deliver better design and landscaping standards and might produce a vision that could realize Wright's boathouse but with a modern use and a comprehensive vision for the corridor.

The city, Cieslewicz said, already has some ambitious plans in the works — a new Central Library, a public market, and Central Park, but faces fiscal challenges, and must move prudently. "It's important to not try to do everything at once," he said.

But "times like these are the times you plan," Host-Jablonski said. "It gives you breathing room."

Any significant change will take community and political will, and "the only way you get political will is with a vision,"  he said.