Eric Tadsen
Kenton Peters has been lugging a model of his vision for John Nolen Drive to meetings for decades, trying to spark interest.
When Kenton Peters’ son was growing up in Madison in the 1970s, he’d go watch water ski shows on Lake Monona at Law Park.
Kenton Peters Jr. remembers the setting as a bit strange, watching skiers from a narrow patch of green space as cars whizzed back and forth behind him on John Nolen Drive.
“It just seemed weird to have the road and all the traffic back behind you, and then just that little narrow strip of grass,” Peters says. “We lived over on Lake Mendota, where it was all houses, so if you didn’t own a house on the lake, you really couldn’t get to the lake. Here you could get to the lake, but you just had a little strip of grass and a highway behind you.”
It so happens that his dad, the distinguished architect Kenton Peters, had a solution to this quandary: build on top of that highway and create space where people could enjoy Lake Monona apart from all that traffic. Kenton Jr. admits that he’s a little biased, but says the idea “made perfect sense,” both then and now.
“It seemed like an intuitive thing, and it would be shortsighted for the city not to do this,” says Peters, who followed in his dad’s footsteps to become an architect. He now lives and works in Salt Lake City.
Kenton Peters Sr.’s idea for a lakeside park over John Nolen Drive makes perfect sense to a lot of people. But while Madison’s most famous living architect has been pushing variations of the idea for almost 40 years, it has gained little traction. There are signs, though, that some are warming to the notion.
Now in his 80s, Peters is making the park a late-life crusade, convinced that Madison desperately needs it. Moreover, he says he can build the project without any cost to taxpayers.
“I’m not going to quit on it,” Peters says in his Union Transfer condo, which overlooks Lake Monona. “This needs to be built. I’ll contact and lobby every person I have to.”
“It’s an insult to the lake and to the people here that a seven-lane highway and a sliver of a miserable little park is all we have to recognize the lake,” he adds.
Regarded as both visionary and arrogant, Peters’ efforts to build a park on Lake Monona have some people comparing him to another visionary architect — Frank Lloyd Wright — who spent decades pushing the concept for Monona Terrace. That project was eventually built, in an altered form, almost 40 years after Wright died.
Some are hoping Peters’ project will finally be realized.
“We have the city of lakes; let’s be that as fully as possible,” says Ald. David Ahrens. “This is a great work from a great architect. Just as the Monona Terrace plan was on the shelf for a half a century or so, this has been on the shelf for too many years. It’s too bad that when we built the Terrace this wasn’t part of it. But we can still fix it.”
Kenton Peters still gets a little emotional when he talks about how he first settled on architecture as a vocation. “It’s one of those tales that I’d say is very poetic and romantic,” he says.
Peters grew up in both Kentucky and the Chicago suburbs and came to Madison to attend the UW. At the university, he was a star athlete, playing in the 1953 Rose Bowl, which the Badgers lost to USC. Shortly after that game, Peters was back on campus in a drafting classroom late one evening getting some one-on-one instruction from a local architect. As the architect watched Peters draw, he remarked, “Hey, you’re pretty good — have you ever thought of being an architect?”
It was an ah-ha, light bulb moment. Afterwards, Peters remembers walking back to his fraternity house on Langdon as snow lightly fell on a quiet campus and the realization of what he wanted to do with his life sank in. “A young person would be very lucky, as I was, to be able to identify what you want to do,” he says.
After graduating from UW, he spent two years with the Army Corps of Engineers, helping to build airports, roads and bridges. Then he went to architecture school at the University of California, Berkeley.
At a conference, he bumped into Joe Flad, a Wisconsin architect, who offered him a job back in Madison. Peters accepted.
While working with the architecture firm, he started moonlighting out of his own office on State Street. When “old man Flad” found out about it, he gave Peters an ultimatum: close his side office or clean out his desk.
“I said, ‘I’m out of here,’” Peters remembers. “Flad must have had 40 people at the time, and I’m a loner.”
He immediately began drumming up business by identifying school districts around the state that were looking to add classroom space. It kept food on the table. But as an architect, Peters was drawn toward larger buildings and big ideas.
In his career, he’s built more than 100 buildings. Notable Madison projects include the metallic blue Robert W. Kastenmeier U.S. Courthouse on North Henry Street, the Warner Park and James Madison Park shelters and the St. Paul University Catholic Center. His condo buildings along Lake Monona — including Union Transfer, where he shares a penthouse apartment with his wife — were among the first in the downtown luxury condo boom. His Marina project next door to Union Transfer was famously dubbed a “garbage can on the lake” by former Mayor Sue Bauman.
“He’s not willing to accept the tired notion of building buildings that fit in,” architectural critic Whitney Gould once said of his style.
Peters doesn’t dispute that, saying his goal is to help shape an urban environment and inspire change.
“Blending in has different dimensions to it. Looking alike is one of them, and often that is not a desirable end,” he says. “It’s not an in-your-face kind of thing, saying I don’t want to relate. It’s more of a change that would perhaps encourage people to change also, with different densities, uses.”
Ald. Mike Verveer says Peters has certainly made his mark on the city. “The contemporary design in his creations are not everyone’s cup of tea,” he says. “I personally enjoy them.”
“I’ve heard more than one person make comparisons to Frank Lloyd Wright when discussing Kenton,” he adds. “No one can deny he’s had an illustrious career in architecture.”
Peters no longer maintains an architecture office, but he continues generating ideas and concepts that he’d like to build. His focus now is hyper-local, restricted to a square-mile area adjacent to his home in downtown Madison.
Some of his plans are decidedly radical and are hard to imagine being realized. For instance, he would like to move several downtown streets into underground tunnels and create covered walkways of winter gardens and commerce on the surface. He’d also like to move many of the state offices to the east side and convert the current office buildings to housing.
But there’s one idea that remains surprisingly simple and affordable: a park along the shores of Lake Monona.
The idea first came to Peters in the 1970s when MATC — what’s now known as Madison College — was looking for another campus.
“I was sitting in my office down on Hamilton Street, and it just dawned on me, why don’t we build it out here?” Peters remembers. This was before Monona Terrace was built. Peters envisioned building a college campus over John Nolen Drive. The top of the building would be a pedestrian park and walkway, terracing down to the shore.
MATC eventually settled on a more traditional campus near the airport, while maintaining its downtown building. But in the ’80s and ’90s, as interest grew in building a convention center, Peters revised the concept. His convention center design eventually lost out to Wright’s old concept, which was built and opened in 1997.
But as Peters built other projects along Lake Monona, the idea stuck with him. Finally, he envisioned it as a simple park, to include a restaurant, an outdoor amphitheater and a skating rink. The park would be concrete, with lots of greenery, slowly terracing down to the lake.
Directly below the park would be one level of parking, accessible from John Nolen Drive, that would include 500 spaces. There would also be room for a bicycle center.
Peters promises that this can be built without any direct property tax money.
His idea is this: The city would borrow the roughly $12.5 million needed to construct the parking and decking over John Nolen. Peters and his partners would then lease parking spaces from the city for an amount that would be enough to pay the yearly debt service on that loan.
Peters notes that he would be paying more for the parking than developer Bob Dunn offered to pay in the Judge Doyle Square proposal that recently fell through.
“[Dunn] was going to pay $115,000 a year for 650 spaces. It’s ridiculous — that’s $15 a month a parking space,” Peters says. “We’re going to run that garage as a business. We’ll have to pay over $500,000 a year in rent because that’s what it will take to pay off the bond issue.”
To build the $7 million to $9 million park on top of this garage and highway decking, the city could tap into its park impact fee fund. Every time developers build a housing project, they pay a fee into this fund. The money is reserved for the development of new parks or improvement of existing ones.
Construction of his proposal, Peters says, would be fairly simple and could be completed in a year. Most of the construction could be done without closing John Nolen.
Peters says that he has talked with potential partners for the project, but declines to name them. The absence of an active partner or financing has some people questioning Peters’ ability to deliver. Verveer notes that it took a massive effort by the city, county and state, along with private support, to finally build Monona Terrace.
“If Kenton had been able to secure a major financial commitment for the proposal, like Evjue Foundation or Goodman Foundation,” he says, “then I think the project might seem more within reach.”
He adds that Madison did include funding in the budget to study various concepts, including Peters’, for dealing with John Nolen and improving lake access.
Ald. David Ahrens is not what you would call a “yes man.”
First elected in 2013, Ahrens has made a name for himself opposing the massive Judge Doyle Square project, which in its various incarnations calls for several million dollars in city subsidies for private parking and a hotel.
Nevertheless, Ahrens sees something in Peters’ idea worth championing. For one thing, it wouldn’t require any tax incremental financing, he says. He also likes its civic nature — carving out space along Lake Monona for everyone to enjoy, not just hotel guests or conventioneers.
“It would have a tremendous amount of use, because we can see even the poorly placed and structured Law Park has quite a few people using it, even though it’s next to a highway,” Ahrens says. “The city would have something else to offer people who come downtown other than commerce.”
He also thinks it would help Monona Terrace attract more conventions.
Other newer council members have also shown interest in Peters’ idea, hoping to perhaps tie it in with the Judge Doyle Square project, which has sputtered and stalled several times over the past decade. The most recent proposal called for Exact Sciences to build its headquarters on the site, behind the Municipal Building, a few blocks from where Peters would put his park. But since Exact Sciences pulled out of the project in September, the city has gone back to the drawing board.
Peters has ideas for Judge Doyle Square as well. He envisions building six apartment towers, a hotel and underground parking on the site. For him, getting more people living downtown is the key to building property tax base and fueling commercial development.
Office buildings are a dead end, he argues. “Why don’t we look at State Street as an example? It’s the busiest street in downtown, and there are no big office buildings on it.”
But it’s his park plan that excites some. “It’s pretty cool. It gets a lot more park line and covers up an ugly highway,” says Ald. Ledell Zellers. “I hope we take a serious look at it.”
Ald. Sara Eskrich says the project would help the city take more advantage of the lakes.
“We talk a lot in Madison about the value of being on an isthmus and the real positive health impacts. There’s a lot of value of having nature incorporated in an urban environment,” she says. “These lakes are not going anywhere.”
Eskrich hopes the idea will finally gain traction. “It is a really ambitious project; it is very different, and things that aren’t traditional need really strong leaders behind them,” she says. “And it doesn’t seem like anyone, at least on the council side, has taken that on.”
Peters’ isn’t the only one with a plan to create a lakefront park over John Nolen Drive.
A group of architects — calling themselves the Madison Design Professionals Workgroup — began meeting a few years ago when the city was working on the downtown plan, which was approved in 2012. The group is now promoting an idea to bury John Nolen Drive east of Monona Terrace to create a park on top.
Tim Anderson, one of the group’s architects, says the city could also move much of Blair Street underground. This would make the messy intersection where John Nolen, Blair, Williamson and Wilson streets converge into a much more pedestrian- and bike-friendly space. It would also help connect the growing east side with the Capital and open up Blair Street for pedestrian-friendly development.
The biggest obstacle: It would be very expensive, costing roughly $100 million to $150 million. It also requires getting the approval to bury railroad tracks. Anderson says the city should go after a federal TIGER grant, which can be as much as $200 million, for the project.
Peters argues that burying John Nolen is problematic because it leaves the park still hard to get to from downtown. From the Square, most people would have to take an elevator down to it.
Anderson says that either project would be worth it for the city. Researchers have found that covering over or burying highways and train tracks pays enormous dividends for cities. One study found that Chicago’s Millennium Park spurred $1.4 billion in private investment over a 10-year period.
“Our two ideas are trying to accomplish similar things,” Anderson says. “Kenton’s proposal and our proposal really look at the value of that lakefront and talk about what you can do to create a major waterfront park.”
Although Peters may have a gift for thinking big, he’s no expert salesman. In his career, he’s often clashed with residents who didn’t share his dreams.
“Visionary people often don’t have the best skills at proposing their thoughts in ways that make people feel comfortable,” says Bert Stitt, who lives in the First Settlement neighborhood. Stitt fought Peters over the Union Transfer redevelopment — and was dismayed when Peters defied the city by building the project taller than what had been approved.
Although Stitt says he appreciates some of Peters’ ideas, he’s not crazy about the concept for a lakefront park, fearing it would block the view of the lake from his neighborhood. “I think it’s way overstated for John Nolen Drive,” he says, fearing it would take away from the city’s “pastoral” nature.
Ahrens says some people can’t get beyond the messenger when considering the idea. “His age is a factor that, consciously or unconsciously, creates a negative cast on his work, which is very modern and very innovative,” he says. “People think he’s an old crank.”
Although Peters may have built more buildings in Madison than any living architect, he never got the adoration and success on the coasts that Wright did, Ahrens says. “He hasn’t been validated in New York or California, so we get to ignore him here,” Ahrens says.
Peters dismisses the idea that he’s in the same league as Wright. He sees the comparison to Wright’s quest to build Monona Terrace late in his life, but quips: “I want very much to build this, but I just refuse to die to get it built.”
Nor does he view the quest as an effort to secure his legacy as an architect. He’s fond of a quote from President Harry Truman: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit.”
“If they want to, put John Nolen’s name on it; if they want to, put Paul Soglin’s name on it. I don’t care,” he says. “I think it’s an idea. Ideas are cheap, but they’re the source of great things.”
