Tommy Washbush
The Madison Public Market.
It looks like Madison’s public market will open sometime in the second half of this year, only about two decades after it was first proposed. That’s about the average gestation period for a major project in our town, but even that squishy date might not hold.
A recent article by Isthmus’ Linda Falkenstein raised questions about the Madison Public Market Foundation’s management. The project was built with $21 million in taxpayer money and some private funds, but it has now been spun off to the nonprofit foundation. So far, so not-so-good.
For one thing, nobody at the foundation seems to want to talk to the press. Linda’s many attempts to get basic questions answered have been rebuffed, often completely ignored. And the opening date keeps getting pushed back. As of her April writing, it appeared that less than half of the 28 vendor stalls had been filled. But in a follow-up story in this month’s paper, Linda reports that things seem to have progressed. While there’s no solid number provided on how many slots are now covered, things seem to be progressing. Fortune Favors, the popular Madison-based candied pecan maker, just signed on to the market, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
But, of course, once selected, those vendors will need time to build out their spaces, so I wouldn’t count on a summer opening, which is the most recent date floated by the foundation. In the meantime, the idea seems to be a kind of soft opening with food carts outside of the building.
Whenever it opens, what we’ll get is a far cry from the original idea. I know that because I started the process when I was mayor some 20 years ago. My idea was for a downtown market that was part of a bigger concept we called Public Market Square. The notion was to put the market in close proximity to a new high speed rail station beneath the Department of Administration building on East Wilson Street, a new hotel to serve Monona Terrace, a new office building for city government, and a transit station. Imagine emerging from your rail trip and the first thing you take in is a public market with all kinds of brightly colored fresh foods and great smells? What a terrific first impression for the city that would have been.
And, by the way, we didn’t pay some consulting firm a million dollars to come up with Public Market Square. As I recall it, I was meeting with my staff one day when I looked out our conference room windows at the site and said, “Hey, why don’t we call it Public Market Square?” The reactions around the room were something like, “Yeah, sure.” “Whatever you want, boss.” “Sounds good to me.” And “Hey, is there more coffee out there?” And so it was ordained.
But we did pay a consultant to suggest the best site and their conclusion was that it had to be downtown to take advantage of the foot traffic. Their recommendation was to put it on the empty block on East Washington Avenue, behind GEF 1, which was then the Brayton city parking lot. It’s now mostly vacant after it served as a staging area for the bus rapid transit project.
I wasn’t crazy about that site because I thought there was too much dead space between it and the Square and because the city had been messing around with ideas for the Brayton lot forever. I didn’t want the market to get caught up in and slowed down by all the complicated things that would have to fall into place to redevelop that whole block. So, I wanted to put it on the corner of Doty and Pinckney streets, behind the Municipal Building, where the new Embassy Suites hotel stands today.
Anyway, it was all moving along swimmingly in late 2010, before everything went to hell. First, Scott Walker got elected governor and torpedoed high speed rail before he even formally took office. So much for the train station. Then a few months later I lost my reelection bid to Paul Soglin, who scrapped the downtown site and launched a lengthy effort to find another location. He renamed the same area Judge Doyle Square — to his credit, just because he wanted to and without paying a consultant a dime.
And then the city became even more focused than it had been on social justice issues and so those goals were wrapped into the project. My idea was simply to provide an amenity that vibrant cities had, not unlike a civic center or a central library. So, I thought it was a mistake to add on this goal simply because, if you started with the notion that you wanted to invest $21 million on social justice, nobody would suggest you do it with a public market. It seemed like an idea that was shoehorned into a concept that was never a good fit.
In any event, the search for a new site and the layering on of a challenging new mission delayed the market further. In the meantime, in other cities private “public” markets were springing up, like the Eataly concept in New York and Chicago. The One Social food court on East Wilson Street is a smaller local example.
Along those lines, if I could digress for a moment, I saw another one of these in action this winter when I visited relatives in Naples, Florida. It’s called Seed to Table and it's basically a MAGA public market. I kid you not. The owner is a big Trump supporter and so there’s MAGA merch interwoven with organic this and farm-raised that and the whole know-where-you-food-comes-from vibe. It’s sustainable MAGA. It’s Alice Waters meets Stephen Miller, which is to say it’s very strange. There was even a big MAGA Beer (yes, that’s a thing) display where you could take your picture next to a life size cutout of Trump, wearing a king’s robe and a crown. I thought about getting my picture taken in an ironic sort of way. I thought better of it, but I saw other customers getting their pictures taken in what I took to be a non-ironic sort of way.
The point of my digression is that the public market concept is working in other places, but without the public purse behind it. So, I’m really not sure that, while we were doing our usual endless Madison dance, the whole concept hadn’t evolved in a way that made the $21 million taxpayer subsidy unnecessary.
Nonetheless, all that is chai under the bridge now. The building is where it is — on First Street in the former city vehicle maintenance facility, and I think it looks quite handsome. And, according to Linda’s report, the foundation has pulled back a bit on its effort to get diverse vendors, though how much they’ve retreated isn’t clear since they seem allergic to reporters.
Still, while I can’t claim any credit for it and, in fact, I may well have cut our losses and abandoned the project years ago, I don’t want this public market to crash and burn, nor do I think it will. Madisonians love food and social progressivism and even the neighborhood around the site has grown up to the point that maybe it’s not such a terrible location after all.
So much about this doesn’t make sense and yet somehow I think it’s going to come together — though probably after a bumpy initial phase. Milwaukee’s public market was a mess for its first several years, but is now thriving.
In 2012, only a little over a year after Madison voters asked me to find another line of work, I wrote a cover story for Isthmus about where the public market project stood back then. I concluded that story by writing, “A public market is just too perfect for this city of foodies and urban farmers. Once it was built, we would eat it up.”
Through the twists and turns, bad decisions, cost overruns, and what appears to be shaky management right now, that’s still true. I still think it’ll work in the end. And it only took 20 years or so. How Madison is that?
[Update: About four hours after this blog posted, the Madison Public Market Foundation announced a grand opening date of July 23, 2026.]
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
