Ouch, our eyes!

Staff writer Phil Davis' cover story identifies "Eyesores of Madison," leading with the vacant Kohl's on Monona Drive and its "reams of peeling paper that only partially cover the abandoned building's cruddy, unwashed windows." Also nominated: Chief Auto Parts off East Broadway (where "mountainous heaps of rusting cars" serve as a "reminder of the high, ugly price we pay - at home and now in the Persian Gulf - to support a wasteful car-culture lifestyle"), the Wil-Kil Pest Control sign ("a five-foot cockroach on one side of the sign and a monstrous rat on the other"), and the Trachte Co.'s metal sheds at Dickinson Street and East Dayton ("like a scattering of backwoods shotgun shacks"). Some of Davis' nominees endure, others have yielded to improvement or removal, and a new generation of eyesores has cropped up in the intervening 20 years.