City of Madison
Holy Redeemer Catholic Church on West Johnson Street is one of the historically significant buildings highlighted in the city’s draft preservation plan. Built in 1869 to serve German immigrants, the church became a spiritual home in the 1980s to Spanish-speaking immigrants.
Madison’s efforts to preserve its history have tended to focus on buildings. That’s about to change as the city develops its first preservation plan, which will instead look at what’s important to the city’s residents and cultures. A particular emphasis will be on groups that have traditionally been ignored.
“The focus for creation of a plan has been on underrepresented communities,” says Ald. Marsha Rummel, who represents the Atwood and Marquette neighborhoods. “African Americans, Ho-Chunk Nation, Hmong, Latinx, LGBTQI and women — the history of these groups has been missing from the official story about Madison.”
This has been the trend beyond Madison, says Heather Bailey, the city’s preservation planner. “Just how do you go about incorporating diverse stories?” she asks. “The way that preservation was set up, it had a strong architecture focus. And it was very much about pretty buildings. And that is a very important part of preservation, but it can’t be the sum total of what preservation is all about.”
The shift in focus comes as the city develops both a historic preservation plan and makes changes to its landmarks ordinance. The city is paying Legacy Architecture of Sheboygan $210,000 to consult on both endeavors.
Legacy submitted the draft historic preservation plan recommendations for consideration by the city’s Preservation Plan Advisory Committee. The draft is informing revisions to the city’s landmarks ordinance, which are being considered by the city’s Ad Hoc Landmarks Ordinance Review Committee.
Rummel, who sits on both committees, says the plan will help the city understand what it needs to preserve. The plan and revisions to the landmarks ordinance are expected to separately reach the Common Council sometime late autumn.
“I am encouraged that the city’s upcoming historic preservation plan advances issues that my administration see as a priority for Madison; namely preservation’s role in housing, sustainability and racial justice,” says Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway. “It is also important for the city to take into consideration both the social and economic benefits of our cultural assets.”
The push to rethink how Madison protects its history began in 2009 with the redevelopment of The Edgewater as a “historic hotel resort.” The city’s Landmarks Commission objected to the renovation proposal, sparking a political fight. Then-Mayor Dave Cieslewicz vowed to “fix” the way the city handles preservation, both the “broken city approval process” and the “vague and narrowly drafted [landmarks] ordinance.”
Broken or not, the debate gave everyone pause. Instead of a problem, perhaps this was an opportunity. “Our ordinance was old,” recalls Jason Tish, whose Madison-based Archetype consulting firm is a subcontractor to Legacy Architecture. From 2009 to 2014 he served as executive director for the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation.
“A lot of the language in our ordinance was outdated,” he says. “It was drafted in the early ’70s. Standards for how to treat historic properties have changed quite a bit.”
Less than 1 percent of Madison’s landmass is included in its five local historic districts. Each district has its own set of regulations in the ordinance.
“The city wanted to look at updating those sections,” Tish says. “Our general recommendation is to write an ordinance that applies to all of those sections at once, with some special considerations for differences in each of the districts.”
In large part the updated standards come straight from the U.S. Parks Service, which governs the National Register of Historic Places.
Kurt Stege, president of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation, objects to replacing the individual historic district standards with one that mirrors national standards.
“Obviously, those standards were not developed with input from the Madison districts and don’t necessarily reflect a consensus of the residents,” he argues. “The tradition in Madison is to have a lot of input from each district in developing their own standards, because, for example, of the vast differences between the existing districts.”
Tish believes that concern is unwarranted. “Those [new] standards will be very similar to the standards that exist in the current ordinance,” he says. “It’s all still there. It’s just in a different shape, a different format. All the protections will still be there.”
The draft preservation plan makes recommendations about education, outreach and tourism.
Exploration of the history of underrepresented groups will be ongoing, and will rely on help from local cultural organizations, preservation groups, neighborhood associations and Native American nations. The city’s public outreach efforts “also assisted in documenting significant places, events and people from underrepresented communities,” says Bailey.
The plan includes an inventory of places that are significant to traditionally marginalized groups. There’s also consideration given to religion, arts and literature, social and political movements
Strategies for preserving these histories include creating storytelling plaques, promoting cultural tourism, and organizing educational events likes history tours. There’s also a recommendation to create a “disaster response plan” that would help property owners save historic properties if there’s a natural disaster or fire.
Rummel admits it’s an ambitious to-do list. “Plans like this get turned into bite-size chunks for staff to work on over time,” she says. “We don’t have the capacity to implement all the good ideas in the plan in one fell swoop. We need community partnerships for this plan to succeed.”
Promotion of historic preservation as a driver of economic development is emphasized. It recommends creating a database of properties eligible for historic tax credits, creating a revolving loan fund that can be used to renovate historic properties, and identifying available grants.
“People like authentic places,” says Rummel. “When you look at the impact of Epic on our region, one thing is clear: many Epic workers choose to live downtown and in older neighborhoods in the core of the city. Because they are more interesting places.”
This is the “Creative Class” of young professionals courted by cities. Often working in technical fields, they’re thought to cherish experience more than ownership, and they have large disposable incomes.
Tish notes that on the east side, where he lives, “all of the cool, hip restaurants bars, breweries, event-places, things like that, are in old buildings. They’re in old commercial buildings, they’re in old industrial buildings.”
He points to the Mint Mark restaurant, 1929 Winnebago St. “It’s not an architecturally interesting building. It’s just a little utilitarian one-story cinder block building,” he says. “But what it’s not is a building you can see in the rest of the country. And there’s a story to it.”
