David Michael Miller
Some ambitious ideas for connecting Lake Monona to downtown include building a park over John Nolen Drive.
It’s a problem that Madisonians have been trying to solve for more than a century — how to create a public space along Lake Monona that connects to downtown.
Eric Knepp, the city’s parks superintendent, hopes that this generation will be the one to solve it. “Multiple generations have wrestled with this issue and as of yet, we haven’t yet figured it out,” Knepp says. “But I’m hopeful with this one we will.”
The city is now getting behind the effort that could completely transform downtown and the lakefront. The Parks Division is finalizing a $190,000 contract with the Madison office of SmithGroup, an architectural, engineering and planning firm. The company will be doing preliminary technical work to determine what could be possible with Law Park and the Monona lakefront. Working with subcontractors, it will also begin gathering public input in June about how people would like to use the park.
“This is a truly citywide park with very limited space to work with,” Knepp says. “It’s a park of statewide interest. If you come to the Capitol, that’s where you’re going to get to the lake and Monona Terrace. It’s all a public commons.”
The consultant work will set the stage for a formal park master plan process, which is expected to begin this fall and be completed by the end of 2020 or early 2021, Knepp says.
He acknowledges that there have been many attempts to address the issue. In 1911, legendary urban planner John Nolen proposed tiered public terraces leading to a mile-long esplanade along the waterfront. Frank Lloyd Wright also had ambitious plans for the Monona lakefront, only some of which were realized with Monona Terrace.
More recently, Madison’s preeminent architect, Kenton Peters, has proposed covering John Nolen Drive and creating a park on top. Another group of architects and planners, calling themselves the Madison Design Professionals Workgroup, has proposed various iterations of the “Nolen Waterfront Vision,” which would create a 1,500-foot-long park over John Nolen Drive. Estimates for some of these ideas have topped $150 million.
Knepp says the next step won’t involve looking at specific proposals.
“I hate to say boring, but pretty boring technical work,” he says. The work is necessary “for a project that will be as tough as this one will be.… It’s a small space on the lake that floods regularly, next to Monona Terrace and a major thoroughfare. So there’s a lot of technical details that we want to have available before we start the formal master plan process.”
That detail will help determine what’s possible on the shoreline, he adds.
“There are places where right now it’s mostly rip-rap large fieldstone,” he says. “That’s certainly resilient to ice shove and wave erosion. But is a stepped edge like [UW-Madison’s] Union Terrace possible here? You can speculate a lot, but until we have someone running calculations, you don’t know if it’s possible. It probably is, but we don’t know at what level of design or what you have to do to make it work.”
Ald. Mike Verveer, whose district includes the park, says he’s thrilled to see the city finally making progress on “what would be a truly monumental project for our community. We finally will get going and build on the work of many visionaries.”
Verveer has sponsored capital budget amendments to fund planning for the project in the past couple of years and he says there’s more than $600,000 available to do planning work for it.
“The bureaucracy is finally moving,” Verveer adds. “I wish it was a lot quicker.”
