Where goes the neighborhood?

George Fabian, Nick Baldarotta and Richard Trameri couldn’t imagine a better place to grow up than the Greenbush neighborhood of the early 20th century.

The three — now in their late 80s and early 90s — remember the neighborhood as a place where Italians, Jews and African Americans coexisted peacefully. “We had diversity before it was fashionable,” says Fabian. When they weren’t in school, they were usually at Brittingham Park, playing baseball, hockey or volleyball.

They remember the neighborhood’s family-run restaurants and bars, and corner groceries where families kept tabs and paid when they had money. The three men can now be found reminiscing about the old neighborhood every Friday and Monday at one of its last remnants — Fabian’s shoe repair shop on Park Street. The shop closed for business two years ago, but remains their hangout.

“I’m glad we were brought up in that neighborhood,” Fabian says on a recent Friday. “I tell people we had everything but money.”

To which Trameri adds: “And we didn’t need that.”

The Greenbush neighborhood might have been paradise for three Italian boys, but to Madison officials in the ’50s and ’60s, it was a blight.

Beginning in the early ’60s, the city razed more than 233 residential buildings and 33 commercial and industrial structures to make way for hospital expansion and, ostensibly, to create better, more affordable, housing. More than 1,150 people were displaced.

“The city came in, I call it gestapo tactics, they said, ‘This is how much you’re going to get and this is how much time you’ve got to get out,’” remembers Fabian, who was a newlywed in his 20s when he was evicted. “It was a land grab. They kicked everybody out, tore the houses down and it sat vacant for years.”

“My folks owned their house for 30-35 years,” says Trameri. “The city gave them a deadline to leave. And when they weren’t out, they had to pay rent to live in their own home until they found another home.”

For many of the immigrant families, the loss of community was devastating. Older women — many of whom worked in the home and didn’t speak fluent English or drive — felt lost in suburbia. “A couple of the ladies almost had a nervous breakdown because they didn’t have anyone to talk to,” says Baldarotta.

Madison historian Stuart Levitan says although the Greenbush removal happened more than 50 years ago, the legacy of it endures.

“We are still living with the mistakes we made during urban renewal,” he says. “There are still families shattered to this day by what the city and the [Madison] Redevelopment Authority did.”

Now, Madison is gearing up to completely redevelop the area once again. The Triangle — which is bordered by Regent, Washington and Park streets and is part of the larger Greenbush neighborhood — contains four public housing projects that are all nearing the end of their life. Bayview Foundation, a nonprofit that provides housing to 300 low-income people in the Triangle, plans to completely rebuild and expand. Across West Washington Avenue, developer Curt Brink wants to redevelop his Parkview Apartments, adding some high-end housing and renovating his affordable units.

The Common Council recently approved the Triangle Monona Bay Neighborhood Plan, which offers a guide for how the area can be redeveloped. But it remains to be seen if the city will learn from its mistakes.

“In the 1960s, we thought we were doing the right thing,” says Ald. Tag Evers, who represents the neighborhood. “I doubt that it was malicious, but it involved displacing a good number of individuals and essentially destroying the fabric of a neighborhood. As we redevelop the Triangle, we have to realize we have a thriving neighborhood and we need to make sure we’re not displacing people once again.

“We just really need to get it right this time,” he adds.

From its earliest days, the Greenbush neighborhood had been viewed by city officials as a problem, says Levitan. Originally marshy ground, for a while it was a city dump and was eventually filled in. Many of the homes that were put there

were moved from other parts of town.

During the Prohibition years, it was a center for bootlegging and speakeasies. “We had nine or 10 killings within a 10-block area over the course of a decade, all related to Prohibition or old world vendettas,” Levitan says. “Cops were getting shot to death, people were getting blown up.”

By the time that Fabian, Baldarotta and Trameri were growing up, that violence had faded, though the tough reputation endured.

It was home to many African Americans not necessarily out of choice. “To a large extent, they couldn’t live in other places. The racial discrimination in Madison was extensive,” says Levitan, who examined the urban renewal of Greenbush in his book, Madison in the Sixties, and will be teaching a class at UW-Madison on it in November. Housing discrimination is one of the central themes running through Muriel Simms’ collection of oral histories of Madison’s early black pioneers, Settlin’.

In 1960, African Americans were restricted to just four neighborhoods and had access to only 20 percent of the city’s housing stock, Levitan says.

Although he readily faults Madison’s leaders for how they handled the Greenbush redevelopment, Levitan doesn’t believe the motives were bad. Some of the houses were in good shape, but the neighborhood needed help. Levitan, who reviewed the housing inspection reports from the 1950s, says some homes in the Triangle had just one toilet, located in the basement, and space heaters on the second floor, he says. The neighborhood’s sewage pipes were too small. The beloved Neighborhood House on West Washington Avenue — a community center where immigrants could take English lessons and kids could play and study — sat next to a junkyard, Levitan says. 

Although many houses could have been saved — Trameri says they were nicer than the historic homes that remain in the Willy Street neighborhood — Levitan says city officials were intent on starting from scratch.

“The feds in Chicago kept saying, as late as 1959, ‘This is not a bulldozer project, this is a rehab and renovation project. You don’t have a critical mass of the number of buildings that have to come down that justify clearcutting,’” Levitan says. “And the city kept saying, ‘no, we’ve got to clearcut.’ Eventually the Chicago feds said, ‘okay, fine.’”

Most homeowners were paid double the assessed value of their homes, Levitan says, which for some was $12,000. Demolition began in 1962. Residents scattered. In 1963, Madison passed the state’s first fair housing law, which gave black residents more housing options.

But then, much of the cleared land sat vacant for 15 years.

“The Redevelopment Authority and federal government did not come in intending to break up the community — they were oblivious to the community,” Levitan says. “They only cared about infrastructure. They saw streets and sewers, they didn’t see people. That’s the tragedy.”

The first new housing in the Triangle was the Gay Braxton Apartments, public housing off of Regent Street, which opened in 1965. The initial cohort of residents were all former residents of Greenbush, Levitan says. The nonprofit Bayview Foundation opened in 1971. Three other public housing projects eventually were built: Brittingham Apartments in 1976; Parkside Apartment Tower and Parkside Townhouses in 1978; and Karabis, the first independent living facility in Wisconsin for disabled people and the elderly, also opened in 1978.

Xay Thor’s last home in Laos was inside a cave near the Thailand border, where she hid with her parents, brothers and sisters. They had nothing to eat but rice kernels. She fled her homeland in the late ’70s, a refugee from proxy wars being fought in Southeast Asia during the Cold War.

After she made her way to a refugee camp in Thailand, Thor eventually settled in America. After a brief stay in the Dells, she moved to Bayview, at the time a relatively new development with 102 townhouse units.

“When I first came, there was a big population of Chinese and whites in this community,” Thor says through a translator. “It’s always been a safe neighborhood. Even as a minority if I was to go somewhere, someone would warn me don’t go too far. They’re always looking out for me.”

Although Thor was one of the first Hmong residents here, more soon arrived. Today, about half of Bayview’s 277 residents are Hmong. Another 20 percent are of another Asian ethnicity, 15 percent are African American, 13 percent Latino and 2 percent white.

Thor has lived in four different units at Bayview. She’s had 21 children — including 10 who died — and for a while her family lived in two units. Her elder children helped raise the younger ones. “Bringing up my children here was really safe,” she says. “I don’t remember anything bad happening.”

Her children are all adults now, although three of them still live with her. Thor has some quibbles about the housing — she wishes there were shelving in the bathroom — but wants to spend the rest of her life here.

 As Bayview prepares to completely rebuild, its stewards say they intend to accommodate Thor and every other resident who wants to stay.

Walking around Bayview, it’s clear to see that it’s a thriving community. Kids are often playing outside or in the community center. Elderly folks sit on benches outside. Lush gardens sprinkle the grounds.

But Alexis London, Bayview’s executive director, says that the infrastructure needs some help. There is frequent flooding, especially in the community center. The basements of the townhouses have mold issues. The buildings need new roofs, wiring and a better fire alarm system. None of the units are accessible to people with mobility issues.

Mary Berryman-Agard, chair of the Bayview Foundation’s board, says the lack of smaller apartments is an issue as the residents age. “If you’ve been there for a really long time and your family has grown up and you need a place to stay, you’re utilizing a three-bedroom apartment, which affordable housing people call overhousing,” she says. “It’s not a good use of resources.”

After doing a needs assessment in 2015, Bayview decided to completely rebuild. The organization embarked on an extensive planning process, interviewing 70 percent of the residents one-on-one and holding several community meetings to discuss what they wanted Bayview to become.

“We knew we wanted to grow the community by some houses, because there’s an affordable housing crisis,” says London. “But our residents told us there’s a certain point where if we grow too big, they’ll feel less comfortable and less safe. We wanted to respect that and we determined that limit was about 30 units. So we’re adding 28 new units for a total of 130.”

Ten of the units will be considered “market rate” apartments, which helps the project qualify for tax credits. But, London says, these units won’t look any different than the rest of the housing — the rents simply won’t be subsidized by the federal government.

The reconstruction will happen in stages, so that nobody will have to move off site. A three- or four-story apartment building will first be constructed on vacant land at the corner of Washington and Regent. Once finished, they’ll move residents from two current townhouse buildings into those apartments, then demolish the townhouses and rebuild there. The whole process is expected to take about 2-½ to three years.

Eventually, there will be eight townhouse buildings, two apartment buildings and a new community center. The new buildings will have more variety in size and be accessible, but there won’t be any basements in the townhouses (because of frequent flooding), which has been a disappointment to many Hmong residents.

The project is expected to cost about $35 million. Tax credits will cover about $20 million and a city grant $2.9 million. The rest will come from grants, loans and a fundraising campaign.

Although the construction will likely be chaotic, London says all the residents want to continue living here. “We think there are a handful of seniors whose children have wanted them to move in with them but they haven’t wanted to leave Bayview because this is their home,” she says. “But we’re wondering if during the redevelopment period that families might push their parents to move in with them. So we might lose some that way. But they all say they want to stay. They say they want to live here the rest of their lives.”

Bayview was hoping to begin construction next spring, but in April, it learned that it narrowly missed getting a tax credit from the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority. It hopes to get the credits next year and could begin construction in the fall of 2020.

“It’s a delay but we found the silver lining. It let us be able to spend more time on the energy efficiency and sustainability of the project,” London says. “It also gives us time to start planning the design of the community center and starting the capital campaign.”

Willie Burrell swore he would never live in public housing.

He was living in Chicago in the early 1980s, working at a penitentiary. He returned home from work early one morning and found that there had been a fire at his house. Luckily, no one was injured, Burrell says, but “without really wanting to accept it, I was homeless, instantly. I had to make up my mind to get my kids somewhere quick.”

So he swallowed his pride and moved his family into Henry Horner Homes, one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects. The move led to a career change after he saw an ad for a housing assistant at the Chicago Housing Authority, working at Altgeld Gardens on Chicago’s southside.

“I left home in the dark, came home in the dark,” he says. “But I just loved it.”

He also became a thorn in the side of the Chicago Housing Authority, organizing a rent strike to protest poor maintenance and suing the authority, alleging discrimination.

After retiring, he moved to Madison in 2010 to be near his daughters. “I told them I’d move to Madison only if you can find me a place near the Capitol,” he says. “And they did it in about two months.”

Burrell lives in the Karabis apartments, a 20-unit building that is the smallest of four public housing complexes in the Triangle. Just as in Chicago, Burrell has been a thorn to Madison’s Community Development Authority, filing public information requests and questioning how much the agency has involved residents in managing its properties.

But it’s clear that he has found a home here. He loves walking around the neighborhood and, with other residents, keeps an unofficial watch over the property. Neighbors will call at all hours if they notice something suspicious. “They’ll call me, ‘Willie, are you looking out the back?’ I’ll look out the back, then I’ll call down to the other end, ‘Look out the back,’” he says. And neighbors check on each other. “If nothing’s happening, we still do it, ‘How are you doing? I haven’t seen you in a while.’”

The CDA’s four complexes in the Triangle include 13 buildings with a total of 335 units. About 350 people live in these buildings. About a third of the residents are elderly, a third are single adults and a third are families with children, says Tom Conrad, interim director of CDA’s housing operations. The CDA also owns the building where the Asian Midway Foods is located at 301 S. Park St.

It’s the biggest concentration of CDA housing. “Although this is a high concentration for us, compared to big cities, this is very low concentration. This would be a small development in Milwaukee,” Conrad says. “But we’re serving a population that’s high in special needs and providing services to them is more efficient here than working in scattered sites.”

But the buildings are nearing the end of their life. They were built at a time when amenities like air-conditioning were considered too lavish for public housing. The agency plans to begin a resident engagement process process this fall that will reimagine its portion of the Triangle. Conrad says it won’t be ready to put a shovel in the ground for at least two years.

“Our intention all along is to continue to provide low-income housing for the residents who are already here,” Conrad says. “Although it’s possible for us to choose a different path, that’s not the direction we’re going.”

While the CDA hasn’t even begun considering what will happen with its property, the neighborhood plan adopted by the Common Council in June offers some guidelines for what it could look like. It envisions increasing density, although not to the level that was called for in the city-wide Comprehensive Plan, which was adopted a year ago.

The Comprehensive Plan called for much of the area to be “high residential,” which could allow for apartment complexes up to 12 stories tall. The neighborhood plan instead calls for much of the land to be zoned “medium residential,” which would allow buildings three to five stories tall. The southern part of the Triangle would remain high residential. Where the Asian market now is, the plan envisions a mixed-use building, eight to 12 stories tall, with a grocery store and other retail on the lower levels and housing above.

“We think that the plan would probably allow for doubling the number of units [in the Triangle], but HUD would probably not subsidize that many units,” Conrad says. “We might not want to build that many because it would change the character of the neighborhood a lot.”

The plan allows Bayview to build as high as five stories on its property, but its plans call for at most a four-story apartment building.

During the neighborhood planning process, some people were suspicious that the end goal is to evict residents of the Triangle to turn it into an enclave of luxury condos and apartments.

Evers — who sits on the CDA board — acknowledges that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has looked for ways to relax deed restrictions on public housing around the country. “One could certainly take a purely economic point of view and say we should turn it into its highest market use,” he says. “You can imagine a professional developer looking at that land, licking his chops, saying ‘Look at what we could do here.’”

Berryman-Agard agrees that gentrification of the Triangle is “a reasonable fear.” She notes that Bayview periodically gets purchase offers from developers of low-income housing.

“But if you look at their portfolios, they’re flipping those projects on a long line,” she says. “They’re meeting their 30-year requirement and then they’re flipping and that’s how they’re bringing investors in. Look at the land we’re on. This is very valuable property.”

Bayview has no interest in that, she stresses. “All of the people have a federally guaranteed right of return. We’re not moving any tenants off of the property even temporarily.”

While giving Isthmus a tour of the CDA property in June, Conrad bumped into an arborist examining the property’s trees for emerald ash borer. Although the property is right in the middle of a city that is being ravaged by the insects, the arborist saw no signs of them. It is likely because the Triangle — surrounded by wide, busy streets that are like moats — is isolated from the rest of the neighborhood, he told Conrad.

That seclusion is one of the things that some residents treasure. But city planners hope to make it a little less isolated. Currently, there’s only one public street on the Triangle, Braxton Place, which dead ends at the edge of Bayview’s parking lot. The neighborhood plan calls for a new road that would stretch from Regent Street to West Washington Avenue, forming a T with Braxton Place. There are also plans to extend UW’s East Campus Mall through the property, connecting pedestrians and bikers to Brittingham Park.

Linda Horvath, who spearheaded the process for the neighborhood plan, says that during meetings, several residents told planners that they’d like to feel more connected to their surroundings. It’s hard to drive into the property or tell guests how to get there. There’s also a need to improve access to Bayview’s community center. In addition, the fire department recommends improving access, because many living here have high needs and mobility issues.

“There’s a real concern that if there were ever major emergencies in that area, getting people out in a safe, timely fashion would be very difficult,” she says.

The proposed street would not be a major road, but a 34-foot wide neighborhood street, with the minimum allowable speed limit and traffic bumps and well-marked crosswalks. It would run along the Bayview and CDA property line and likely be built in phases.

Some residents worry about how this might change the neighborhood’s character. Early in the process, other proposals with more roads were considered.

“The plan department came at it thinking that the way to improve the Triangle was to reimpose the grid system that was taken out when the redevelopment went down,” says Berryman-Agard. “Only half the residents of the Triangle even have cars. There’s a very frail population here that is fearful of fast-moving vehicles and bicycles. There’s a lot of people with anxiety disorders. Connectivity was the virtue that the plan department was thinking about reimposing. Here, connectivity is to friends, to food sources, health care, to social support. And it’s principally a walking proposition.”

Building a new road is particularly alarming to DeWayne Gray, who lives in Brittingham Apartments. Except for three years, Gray has lived in the Triangle since 1993. He loves how it’s both quiet and secluded, but in the heart of downtown, close to UW, shopping and restaurants.

“If you want to ruin the community, all you need to do is open up a street through this area,” he says. “Eighty percent of the individuals here — including those in wheelchairs, including those with mental health issues, including the elderly — will not feel safe.”

Gray was on the steering committee for the neighborhood plan and he loved the chance to be at the table and offer his opinions.

But at the end of the day, he’s not sure that anyone heard him.

“I want the [city officials] to understand, there was never an issue with their vision. The only thing is whether the vision was meant for the residents or was it really meant to open the area up to have a pathway through this neighborhood,” he says. “They’re going to get the final word anyway, but I like having the input, win lose or draw.”