Northern exposure

When Pierce’s Market quietly announced last September it was closing its grocery store in Northside Town Center, community leaders understood what that meant for low-income north-siders.

“When we were looking for a grocer 10 years ago, there were some bites, but we never hooked anything until we identified Pierce’s,” recalls Abha Thakkar, then associate director of the Northside Planning Council.

Pierce’s, however, didn’t move in for nearly two years. During that time places like McDonald’s, Walgreens and Family Dollar became the primary sources of sustenance for those without the means to shop elsewhere. With Pierce’s departure, it appeared north Madison was destined to become a food desert once again.

Thakkar says the council had courted Willy Street Co-op back in 2006 to run a store, but couldn’t make it happen. “We felt Willy Street Co-op was the best fit,” Thakkar says. “But they had never done a second store at that point...and what we needed was something very different from Willy East.”

What a difference a decade makes. On Aug. 15, Willy Street Co-op will open its third store, Willy Street North, with a grand opening celebration slated for mid-September.

The initial concerns many north-siders expressed following the co-op’s January announcement have faded in favor of excitement. With thousands waiting for the co-op to ease their troubles, its managers are feeling the pressure. During a walk-through of the unfinished store on July 1, co-op communications director Brendon Smith tempers expectations.

“We felt it was more important to provide the neighborhood with groceries than wait until everything was perfect before opening,” he says.

Under normal circumstances, it takes up to 24 months to site, plan, staff and stock a new store. Willy Street North will have done it in fewer than eight.

That “get ’er done” spirit is emblematic of the hardscrabble determination that has empowered the north side to guide its own destiny and remains a primary source of a pervasive north-side pride.

“We’re a scrappy group,” Thakkar says, proudly. “Sometimes we north-siders are like an ornery family, but we’re family. We come together with a very strong vision of what we want.”

In many ways, the arrival of Willy Street North marks the arrival of north Madison’s future. The revitalization that began more than 20 years ago with the formation of the Northside Planning Council has primed its resource-rich corridors for a full-fledged revival.

“People in Madison really think in terms of east and west,” says Ruth Rohlich, a city business development specialist and north-side resident. “The north has a very rich and proud history. People here know there is something very special about it.”

At a time when meat-processing giant Oscar Mayer is less than a year away from ending its 96-year reign as the area’s preeminent symbol of working-class identity, the council’s legacy of organizing people around food is now part of its strategic long game to make north Madison a destination for more than just Mallards games.

“Food is at the heart of how we relate to one another,” says Thakkar. “It is a very intuitive thing to organize around.”

North-siders speak wistfully about Oscar Mayer closing early next year. But the gloom-and-doom prognosticating that often presages major transformation hasn’t taken root.

“I don’t fear these changes,” says Christopher “Jonesy” Jones, a bartender at Drackenberg’s Cigar & Cocktail Bar, in Lakewood Plaza Shopping Center. “The north side tends to regulate itself; it can take care of itself.”

North-siders’ confidence that things will work out speaks in large part to the work that the Northside Planning Council has done over the last 23 years organizing and revitalizing more than 20 neighborhood associations. Although the average north-sider may be unfamiliar with how the council’s hand steers the quality of life in this part of town, its fingerprints are found in nearly every corner of civic life.

“They know what businesses are coming in, what developments are happening, what beer Ale Asylum is brewing,” says David Bruns, president of Sherman Plaza Inc., a private company that owns the Northside Town Center, formerly Sherman Plaza.

North Madison is a gem in a city full of them, but some residents still recall the violence that spurred the formation of the council in the early 1990s, as squatters and street gangs followed crack cocaine into Madison-area neighborhoods like Somerset Circle and Simpson Street. The violence was particularly fierce in Vera Court, one of several isolated apartment communities along the Northport corridor.

Since 1976, Pat Butler has lived in Vera Court and its surrounding areas, which, she says, felt cut off from the city proper back when the Madison Police Department was still centralized and community policing was in its infancy.

“We had no connection to the surrounding areas,” she says. “We were a desperate group of people who were just existing, as our area became infested with drugs and gang members.”

At the time, coalitions of neighborhood associations known as planning councils had been effective in curbing drug-related violence in cities like Minneapolis. Planning councils were often tasked with building a community center and publishing a community newspaper.

Although the Northside Planning Council wasn’t the only one to form in Madison during the 1990s, it has always been among the most effective.

“They had very strong individuals who organized this, and they became really established very quickly,” recalls Jule Stroick, a city planner. The council helped save Vera Court as it did other north-side neighborhoods by supporting the community leaders who already were fighting back. The cleanup effort in Vera Court began with a woman named Darlene Horner, aka Big Mama.

“From School Road on down Troy Drive, that was Big Mama’s area,” Butler recalls. “Big Mama was always out there talking to everyone, flagging people down, and telling the kids to pull their pants up.”

As it established rapport with the Big Mamas in the isolated neighborhoods and apartment communities along Northport Drive and Packers and North Sherman avenues, the council’s leadership became adept at balancing its advocacy for marginalized residents with its role as a partner to north-side businesses and a point of contact for city officials.

Thakkar, 41, worked for the council from 2001 to 2010, returning as its executive director last July. She says the council has earned bragging rights.

“We have this tremendous legacy of what organized people can do without a lot of wealth at their disposal,” she says. “I think people look at us and see what is possible, and based on our history, a lot is possible.”

The council played lead roles in establishing the Warner Park Community Recreation Center and neighborhood centers in four north-side communities, including Vera Court.

It has mediated disputes between property management companies and tenants, been a consensus builder on hot-button issues and secured funding for beautification projects.

There have been some bumps. The council and its board of directors have butted heads over the years with the Northside Business Association, but the groups are in a different place now, says association president Margo Dixon.

“The people on the council now understand the success of the north side is also dependent on business,” says Dixon, who owns a UPS Store at Northgate Shopping Center. “It’s taken us a while to get to this point, but we do work well together.”

What began as the council’s Northside News newsletter has evolved into a 28-page bimonthly newspaper praised for its quality and tenacity.

“They send it to out to 13,000 households. You don’t see that anywhere else,” says Stroick. “It is the crux of bringing those neighborhoods together; it is a conduit into how to participate in the community at different levels.”

The Northside News has unified neighborhood groups, isolated apartment communities and the north side’s business community under the common identity of “northsiders.”

The paper is so widely read that the ad revenue it generates from area businesses has at times brought the 501(c)(3) perilously close to showing a profit.

The council has also changed how Madisonians see their city. Prior to the council’s branding crusade, north Madison was lumped with an all-encompassing east side.

“The Northside News is really what created the north side,” Thakkar says. “Until then there wasn’t a [cohesive] identity. Of course, we’re the only ones who know that; most of the city isn’t aware we exist.”

David Bruns, 63, speaks of the horse-drawn buggies that used to deliver bottled milk to the single-family homes that had sprung up around the eight-story meat-processing plant that rose above the trees of his family’s 98-acre farm.

“The farm was located about where the city library is,” he says, referring to the Lakeview branch of Madison Public Library. “A lot of the people who bought those homes worked for Oscar Mayer or Webcrafters.”

Bruns is nostalgic for a bygone north-side era, when his father “used to hunt ducks literally where the Duck Pond is now,” he says, referring to the section of the Mallards ballpark where beers are drunk from a bottomless cup.

As a child in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Bruns milked some of the last cows to graze the property before Sherman Plaza went up in 1966. Three of the Plaza’s original tenants remain: the hardware store, the library, and Sherman Plaza Barbershop.

Kroger’s, the plaza grocery store from 1966 until roughly 1976, was replaced by Kohl’s grocery store. In 1998, Kohl’s and Bruns entered into a new lease. Kohl’s moved into a larger Sherman Plaza storefront whose facade improvements Bruns privately financed as part of the new arrangement.

After Roundy’s purchased six Madison Kohl’s food stores in early 2003, it reopened all but the north-side store under its Copp’s subsidiary since Copp’s already had an Aberg Avenue location. Roundy’s has let the storefront farther north sit vacant ever since.

“We became a food desert,” says Bruns.

Few things can stall a neighborhood’s progress like the blight of an empty grocery store. But a noncompete clause in the Kohl’s lease prevented another grocery store from opening at Northside Towne Center.

Madison’s Common Council eventually passed an ordinance prohibiting noncompetes for grocery stores, but it wasn’t retroactive. In the end, Roundy’s acquiesced, but capped the store size at 25,000 square feet. The Northside Planning Council, after an exhaustive search, convinced Pierce’s to move in. However, the costs of running a store outside of its distribution network — it was Pierce’s only Madison location — meant that some prices were out of reach for poor residents. It’s a challenge inherent to selling groceries on the north side: Larger stores don’t have the customer base to be sustainable, but smaller ones are often too expensive.

“We’re never going to get the low costs you see at a store like Woodman’s that has the volume,” says Thakkar. “We’re stuck with that size store.”

Every north-sider, it seems, has a vision for the 29-acre Oscar Mayer property. Some want it added to the north side’s impressive portfolio of greenspace (think Warner Park, Cherokee Marsh, Governor’s Island).

Others see a transportation hub, given its proximity to outbound depots for air, rail, bus and freight traffic. The Northside Business Association supports commercial development, while the council would endorse a mixed-use project.

“The city really wants to see employment — manufacturing if possible — on the property,” says Matt Mikolajewski, director of Madison’s Department of Planning, Community and Economic Development. “What we don’t want is to turn our backs on the employment opportunities for residents over the next 100 years.”

The neighborhood growth plan hashed out in 2009 calls for Pennsylvania-Packers Avenue to remain an employment corridor. Although a mixed-use project might be permissible, density restrictions would still apply, says city land-use manager Jay Wendt

Commercial development isn’t always a win-win, either. Businesses, especially retail, often pass on the north side for the regional draw of the East Towne area. “Mom-and-pop shops aren’t likely on the first floor of a brand-new building, because they can’t afford those rents,” Wendt says.

Making north Madison a destination, some say, will require an emphasis on its role in the upcoming Public Market as a Food Innovation Corridor. The initiative aims to leverage the city’s “food assets” as part of a broader economic development strategy.

There is a basis for this. In what now seems like uncanny prescience, the council’s greatest successes have been food-related undertakings such as Troy Community Gardens, the Northside Farmers’ Market and FEED Kitchens incubator.

“As we looked at the area’s economic potential, food was an area that needed...strategic planning around,” Thakkar says.

FEED Kitchens, on North Sherman Avenue, has had its struggles. It was in such bad financial shape when Thakkar returned to the council that two months passed before she received a paycheck.

But north-side grit helped save it. As FEED’s mortgage was refinanced, and various contracts were renegotiated, the council’s board members rolled up their sleeves — even cleaning bathrooms and sweeping the parking lot — in making a quiet, and humbling, difference.

Thakkar says FEED is poised to supply food to the proposed public market, as food cart proprietors — often people of color — move from incubator to market.

Smith says partnerships between FEED and Willy Street North will strengthen both enterprises as well as the food economy in general. “We’re investing in the community, and we hope the community invests in us.”

Butler believes the co-op could be transformative for low-income residents, who statistically are more likely to suffer from diet-related health issues like diabetes and obesity.

But she doesn’t foresee a perfect union, not instantly at least, between the co-op’s peace-and-rainbows ideal and the in-your-face realities of street-level diversity. While the co-op has agreed to offer more mainstream and culturally relevant, affordable food products, Butler says, “It’s going to be a learning experience for both sides”

Residents who attended a recent meeting at Packer Townhouses — a Section 8 apartment building — to learn more about the co-op also received a lesson in the virtues of purchasing an ownership stake, which added confusion to concerns around affordability.

The co-op’s sales pitch underscored even broader educational disparities between Madison’s haves and have nots.

“I didn’t know anything about co-ops until I started reading about them,” Butler says. “It isn’t like a Sam’s store where you pay a fee every year. I tell people that when you put money into Willy Street, you own a share of it.”

The murder of 24-year-old Christina Hatcher, 24, rocked the north side when police discovered her body in late February during a welfare check. Police later arrested Hatcher’s boyfriend, 39-year-old Jose Vasquez-Garcia.

Hatcher, who had two young daughters, had moved into her Calypso Road apartment just weeks earlier. Her murder was a reminder that the north side has problems.

“There are a few areas of instability that don’t have a lot of resources,” Thakkar says. “So we need to have a coordinated response to these vulnerable areas.”

The council is raising funds to rent an apartment in Brentwood Village Apartments, where Hatcher was murdered, to serve as a base for organizing residents.

According to various neighborhood surveys, violent crime isn’t a top concern for north-siders. North-side police Capt. Jay Lengfeld says a majority of police calls regard quality-of-life issues, like noise disturbances and speeding. “It’s pretty quiet over here,” he says.

A resident of Kennedy Heights Apartments, Butler is at a loss for words at how much north Madison has changed since her mentor, “Big Mama,” offered a glimpse of what north-siders were capable of.

“I’m just following in her footsteps,” says Butler, who became a council board member in April.

Shuttles to east-side grocery stores — secured by the council with a city grant after Pierce’s closed — will be available even after the co-op opens. “Not everyone will be able to afford the co-op, because it can be expensive,” Butler says. “People will still need to go to Woodman’s.”

As the council continues to improve the north side, Thakkar continues to improve the council, relocating its International Lane office to Northside Town Center, for a savings of $800 a month.

Not that that’s where you’ll find Thakkar. Since becoming executive director last July, Thakkar has worked out of a conference room at FEED Kitchens. Recently, she moved into a shared office, where she was given a new desk. “I know it’s just a desk,” she laughs, “but it’s a big deal.”

Regardless of whether it is a new community center, a grocery store or a new desk, few things have come easy to north Madison, and what it’s got has no doubt been hard won. It’s north-side pride, Thakkea says, that inspires north-siders to think big, but in proportion to their needs.

“We’re not the trendy or image-oriented side of town,” she says. “What you see is what you get. [We] get that working for the greater good eventually comes back around.”

[Editor's note: This article was changed to indicate that the Northside Planning Council is still looking for an apartment to rent in Brentwood Village Apartments as an organizing base.]