Midwest of America

Madison, Wisconsin, is a midwestern American city, a little different than other midwestern cities because of the University of Wisconsin and it’s 45,000 students. It’s also the state capital, which is that official looking dome above. The Midwest is dominated by the car — things are more spread out than in the east, but Madison is a progressive place in terms of public space stuff. Pictured above is State Street that runs from the university to the capital — it’s closed to most traffic, though you do have to dodge hacky-sackers. It made for a nice walk, but people kept to the sidewalks still. Madison has all these perfect and cute small town things, like The Orpheum theatre, that make it appealing. No American college town is complete without Ween touring through. Queensryche seems a bit out of place, but perhaps Madison has a darker, wankerish population excited for this show.

For a little place, it has some good architecture, like this bit of brutalism on the university campus. Frank Lloyd Wright also went to university here, and there are some buildings and private houses he designed scattered around and a performing arts centre by Cesar Pelli.

There is also this brutalist “speakers corner” thing on campus. When brutalsim works it’s seems like the buildings just rise up out of the earth, sort of like the Rocky Mountains. Natural and solid and safe. This pedestal looked that way too. Nobody was giving any speeches yesterday, but there was a good view from up there.

This is an insane bike city though. Bike stores everywhere, including this amazing used store that should be called “It’s Raining Bikes.” I’ve never seen so many bikes in one spot. We even bought one and brought it back to Toronto. They had a good selection of vintage bikes, with their years (40s-70s), for sale.

These strange bike lockers were for rent a block away from the capital building. Not a bad idea, but would probably take up too much space if there were lots — and perhaps in a place like Toronto, space is too valuable to make such a thing viable.

The town also has a good network of bike paths, inside the city and out — some rails-to-trails paths that seemed like they would work for commuting, while others were for recreation. I went for a long ride on Monday evening around them — they were super populated with other bikers and runners — Madison is a fit city. I followed the path out of the city into the countryside — after about 20 or 30 kilometers it looped back into town, but not before passing this sign, which was a bit of a worry, but nobody else seemed to worry, so I rode on through it and wasn’t shot. As was mentioned in the comment section of one of my Chicagoland posts, Madison has been praised for it’s live-ability, and progessive policies on stuff like these trails, but the periphery of the city is like everywhere else.

Big new suburban houses like these were all over the countryside, near big fat roads and large parking-lotted plaza’s — more examples of rural sprawl. Strange though that many didn’t have fences, so it seemed like there was lots of open space. The edges, everywhere, are overwhelming sometimes — it’s tempting to be an ostrich and just look at downtowns and urban areas and make sure they stay sustainable and walkable. Maybe only a oil crisis can solve the edge problem.

I waited until I was a block away from this police officer to take his picture — he was sighing as he was handing out “Pedestrian Safety — Everyone’s Responsability” pamphlets. Our Madison host said it was probably a PR campaign after a cyclist was hit by a police cruiser last week (she was alright). Not a bad little pamphlet though, asking “what is a crosswalk” and listing other driver rules with regard to pedestrians. Under “Who is a Pedestrian” it read “Pedestrians are young, old, and every age in between. Some have not yet begun to walk and need to be carried or pushed in a stroller…you have been a pedestrian at some point today, even if it was just getting to your car”. I think the cop would rather have been doing something more exciting though. He had that uncomfortable loitering posture that those Sick Kids canvassers have (except for the ones who, inexplicably, seem to love their jobs — one unplanned benefit of iPods is that they don’t try to talk to you).

All over the city there were these cows (well, they had udders AND horns, so i’m not sure if they were cows or bulls or some kind of she-male bovine) done up by various artists, like those Toronto Moose of some years ago.

Also like all American college towns, Madison suffers from Hippy Mural Syndrome. Usually they’re all about peace (and giving it a chance), Jimi Hendrix or how mankind is so dumb — this one on the side of a co-op was about food and Satan, I think.

There is a plaque here too, over looking Lake Monona (Madison is surrounded by lakes), where Otis Redding’s plane crashed in 1967. Madison is a happy, calm, tranquil place, so this was a sad change. The Midwest seems to eat small planes carrying superstars, like Buddy Holly crashing in Iowa, or Stevie Ray Vaughan also crashing in Wisconsin (in a helicopter though).

We drove though, and it will be good not to drive for a while again. It will also be good to eat regular sized portions of food again. Everything in America is doubled sized. Plates of food are two times the size they should be, even at good restaurants that should know better. That has nothing to do with public space except it makes exploring Amercan spaces feel kind of bloated and gross.