Save a shed

Trachte buildings are a piece of Madison history. And they’re disappearing fast.

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San Francisco has its Queen Anne Victorians, Portland its bungalows, Baltimore its rowhouses.

And Madison has its Trachte buildings.

“They are uniquely Madison,” says Jim Draeger, architectural historian and state historic preservation officer of the Wisconsin Historical Society. “You see them outside of the city, but you see most of them right here in Madison.”

These steel-paneled, barrel-roofed sheds and work buildings have been a big part of defining Madison’s look, particularly on the near east side, for more than a century. They can be spotted across the city — in backyards as garages, along East Main Street and East Washington Avenues as businesses and factories, off Sycamore and Walsh streets and along Lexington and Fair Oaks Avenues as warehouses. They are a part of almost every Madison Gas and Electric substation.

The site of the former manufacturing headquarters of the company itself, at East Mifflin and North Dickinson streets, is itself a warren of Trachte buildings. So Trachte buildings were — how perfect is this? — manufactured in Trachte buildings.

But what exactly is a Trachte building?

The Trachte Bros. Company made prefabricated metal buildings in Madison from 1919 to 1986, when the company moved to Sun Prairie. The company has since split into two companies. Trachte Building Systems, still in Sun Prairie, makes modern self-storage units; Trachte USA in Oregon, Wisconsin, specializes in buildings that house technical equipment, like electrical substations.

The original Trachte buildings were born out of need. With the rise of the automobile, car owners wanted inexpensive garages to shelter their new investments. The original design was for a one-car garage, but the Trachte brothers, George and Arthur, realized that with modular construction, various components could be utilized in a mix-and-match fashion to create any number of buildings, from multi-unit garages to gas stations, restaurants, corn cribs, chicken coops, even airplane hangars. Draeger sees Trachte buildings as “a great symbol of can-do entrepreneurial inventiveness so characteristic of the late 19th and early 20th century.”

These days, original Trachtes are sometimes casually referred to as Quonset huts — a misnomer that can drive the passionate Madison history buff crazy. Quonset huts, which date back only to World War II, feature rounded, corrugated roofs that go all the way to the ground. Trachte buildings usually feature barrel-vaulted roofs, but have straight sides with vertical ribbing further differentiated by beveled horizontal ribs within the vertical ribs. Original metal Trachte doors have a unique, beveled rectangular inset pattern.

“They kind of capture people’s imagination,” says Jason Tish, former executive director of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation. “There are a lot of people who are fans of them in some way or another.”

As sexy as a Queen Anne Victorian? Certainly not. But among devotees, these modest metal sheds demonstrate a lot of personality.

“We’re keeping ours,” says Michele Warnke, whose near west-side lot includes a Trachte garage. “Somebody came by one day on a bicycle and said if we ever think of taking it down, she’d like to buy it.”

Warnke and her husband, Bruce, have lived in their home on Vilas Avenue for 22 years. Some of their neighbors think the garage is hideous; others tell them never to tear it down. Warnke uses the side of the garage as an art gallery of sorts, a backdrop for colorfully painted screen doors and even a recently-added wicker headboard.

“We like that it’s old,” says Warnke, who admits that the door doesn’t work and they can park only one car in it. “We hate to see old buildings destroyed.”

My own attraction to Trachte buildings probably stems from my childhood growing up in east Madison. There were even more of them back then, like the city boathouses once on the banks of the Yahara near the East Johnson bridge. Who knows how our visual environment imprints on our brains at an impressionable age? Whether it’s the landscape in general or the built environment, there is a powerful pull to those early memories.

But I didn’t really notice Trachte buildings until I started working here at the newspaper. My daily bike rides along the East Main Street corridor to the old Isthmus office on King Street gave me an appreciation for a number of Trachtes, including the one I dubbed “Big Green,” a warehouse at 824 East Main St., and the silvery “Kleenaire” building next door at 828.

I came to understand the beauty of their distinctive manufactured qualities — the strong verticals with multiple horizontals paired with the softness of the rounded roof line. That same manufactured look contrasts beautifully with nature, from weeds to blossoming trees to blue skies with angelic white clouds. Rust, rips, the buildup of many years of paint — Trachte buildings, as they decay, are catnip for the sort of photographer who likes to capture urban decay, the kind of photos known as “ruin porn.”

They are “ephemeral architecture,” says Tish. “They’re not made to last for long periods of time, though many of them have proved to be remarkably durable.”

Now is a key time in the history of the Trachte building in Madison. Those that have not been well maintained are rusting out. An even greater threat is redevelopment.

The transformation of the East Washington corridor has seen several fall. The Don Miller repair garages at East Washington and Livingston streets succumbed to the bulldozer in September 2012. Trachte buildings that formerly housed Capital Water Softener at Division and Helena Streets were torn down for apartments. A Trachte shed on the football practice field at East High School — brightly painted in Purgolder colors — was just replaced by a sleek new storage unit. And the former Winnebago Studios artist complex, cobbled together mostly from Trachte warehouses, is now leveled to make way for co-housing and a new circus space. More of the buildings will disappear as the Mautz paint factory in the 900 block of East Washington Avenue is redeveloped.

“I think it is important to save some of them, because it gives us some perspective in terms of where we’ve come from,” Draeger says.

The best place to consider preserving, suggests Tish, would be the factory on Dickinson where they were made. That preservation, though, is “kind of a long shot, because the real estate economics is pretty weighted against preservation of that complex,” he notes.

But there is some good news. Trachte buildings are also being reused in some locations.

Greg Schulte is in the process of transforming a Trachte building that was originally a grocery store into a 1,000-square-foot home. He bought the building on Helena Street on the east side about a year ago; since then he has gutted the interior, added new windows, plumbing and insulation and brought the whole structure up to code.

“Around town, I look at Trachtes when I spot them. I don’t know that I’ve seen another quite as finished off,” he says.

Schulte had a vision of turning some sort of former commercial building into an unusual residence.“I wasn’t specifically seeking out Trachte buildings,” he says, “but I had my eye on this one because I was in the neighborhood, I’d always admired it and thought that would be fun to fix up.”

Schulte likes the “industrial look” the steel buildings have. “It’s interesting to combine with residential remodeling.”

A couple of Trachte buildings are part of the new State Line Distillery at 1413 Northern Court. Sketchworks Architecture created the design and followed State Line founder John Mleziva’s wish to “incorporate as much of the old space as possible.”

When Mleziva first looked at the buildings, they had been vacant since 2002. Yet he saw good bones: “When I saw this building, it fit the bill of having some really interesting architectural pieces that actually were functional for our business. It could house tall stills.”

At the front entrance, the characteristic steel siding has been preserved. From the rear, the barrel rooflines are still visible, though the steel panels have been covered with asphalt shingles and the original vertical siding replaced with new, horizontal panels.

As Mleziva says, “It worked. It fit the core of what we were trying to do.”