[Above: Anglers at Monona Terrace, photo by Maria Powell, July 2022]
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My dad grew up in downtown Madison during the 1930s, 40s and 50s in a home overlooking Lake Monona. He and his siblings fished and swam in the lake and Monona Bay. They also watched the city slowly fill in the lake’s shoreline downtown with city garbage, Madison Gas & Electric coal ash, newspapers, construction debris, sediments dredged from various parts of the lake, and other refuse–so they could develop over it. (See “First View of City for Some Visitors,” The Capital Times, June 11, 1939)
In the 1990s, the city began constructing Frank Lloyd Wright’s dream convention center on top of the city’s lakeshore dump. The $67.1 million center was finally finished in 1997 and dubbed “Monona Terrace.” But my dad called it the “Mistake on the Lake,” as did many others who saw it as a huge boondoggle that would worsen Lake Monona pollution, reduce public green space and shoreline fishing access, and suck funds from more important social and environmental needs.
But few people know this history. It’s buried along with the toxic wastes in the dump under the center–largely invisible, as are the shoreline subsistence anglers, mostly African Americans, who have fished from the bike path over the dump since the center was built. Many travel from Milwaukee, Beloit, Janesville and other urban areas in the region–even as far as Chicago— to fish here for crappies and bluegill.
What poisonous stew of chemicals and metals are leaching from the dump under Monona Terrace and building up in the fish these anglers catch, eat, and feed to family and friends? Who knows. Nobody is measuring. Nobody has ever measured, as far as we know.
Below is a small bit of the buried Monona Terrace history.
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Not everyone loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s convention center
In the late 1980s, Madison leaders revived a proposal to build a conference center on the Lake Monona shoreline at Law Park, to help fulfill early city planner John Nolen’s vision of a “grand esplanade” between the capitol and the lake. Frank Lloyd Wright had designed a center for that location in the 1890s, and proposed building it in the 1930s, but the city rejected the plan. In 1959, the year he died, Wright created a rendering of a civic center building for the site, but a bill banning lakefront buildings over 20 feet high deemed it unbuildable there. In 1990, Wright’s 1959 plans were dusted off for the proposed center, which would be 200,000 square feet, four floors, and require 700 parking slots.[1]
Intense public debates ensued about the center, which would be built on top of the old city dump that extended into the lake—packed with a wide variety of city wastes, including layers of Madison Gas and Electric ash and city newspapers. While running for mayor in 1989, Paul Soglin opposed the center—and city voters rejected the plan—but he supported it once elected a year later. Republican state governor Tommy Thompson, Madison Gas & Electric, and the Wisconsin State Journal were also strong supporters—and the Evjue Foundation, charitable arm of The Capital Times, pledged $3 million dollars to support it.
Downtown business owners were conflicted about whether the center would hurt or help them, and city elected officials and environmentalists had mixed opinions on the center’s potential environmental effects. In May 1990, downtown alder Bert Zipperer told the Wisconsin State Journal that the center and proposed adjacent aquatic center would be “environmentally disastrous,” arguing that filling in the lakeshore “could stir up mercury-laden lake bottom and would destroy fish spawning grounds.” He called it “a plan to pave more of the lakeshore.”
Mainstream Madison enviros were “excited” about the center, but grassroots activists said “It Ain’t Wright”
Mainstream environmentalists thought the convention center was a fine idea. Caryl Terrell, longtime head of the Sierra Club, green space preservation advocate, and member of the city’s Plan Commission, chaired the committee that supervised preparation of the environmental impact statement. “I’m quite excited that such a building might be added to the Downtown area,” she told the State Journal in 1992. “Many of my concerns as an environmentalist could be met by building Monona Terrace,” noting that it would encourage compact development, reduce urban sprawl outside the city, and promote use of mass transit. (REVISION after learning more details in 2022–see addendum)
Grassroots environmental activists, on the other hand, were passionately opposed to the center, primarily because of concerns about toxic discharges from the old dump and loss of public greenspace on the lakeshore. In the early ‘90s, Anne Fleischli, a tenacious and fiery local attorney and activist who lived downtown near the proposed center, organized and led a group called “It Ain’t Wright” to fight it.[2]
In her 2009 self-published writing, Fleischli explained that it wasn’t “Wright” because it wasn’t actually designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (though influenced by his old plans)—and it wasn’t right because it would destroy a large swath of lakeshore parkland and would be on top of a toxic city dump that should be remediated according to Clean Water Act laws.
According to Fleischli, 1,700 pilings were sunk through the dump to stabilize the large building. Scuba divers reported seeing protruding waste drums and leachate from the dump at Law Park “billowing out” as the shallow ground water that traveled from Lake Mendota to Lake Monona swept through that area.
Fleischli lamented the fact that “the newspapers who were major contributors to the dump and the utility that had spread its deadly ash over the dump every day for over twenty years” lobbied hard for the center’s development, with abundant resources to influence public opinion. In her opinion, these powerful entities did this partly to avoid their responsibilities to clean up their toxic messes under new waste regulations developed in the 1980s. “The electric utility was being required to remediate its ash dumps all over town,” she wrote “but this dump was IN the lake, 260 feet into the lake, an expensive proposition to clean up.” The building would “cap” the dump, but “in this case a cap would not stop the leaching of the contaminants into the groundwater and lake because it was already in the lake and the leachate could be visually seen by scuba divers billowing out as the shallow ground water swept through it” which, she continued, would “perpetuate the contamination forever.” [iii]
Before the environmental review process for the site began, Fleischli wrote, she was “counting on environmental laws being enforced.” But as she participated in the DNR’s environmental approval and public meeting processes, she experienced firsthand how meetings were manipulated by powerful entities that wanted the center built—and laws were ignored. At one public meeting, chaired by the Army Corps of Engineers (which did the environmental testing at the dump), a DNR professional presented a memo about the scuba divers observing billowing effluent and protruding waste drums. He was quickly removed from the case.
Fleischli later found a memo from James Klauser, head of the Department of Administration, telling the head of the DNR to find a different manager for the site. She called Klauser “the Governor’s point man” who “was supposed to get this convention center built expeditiously.” She also learned that Klauser’s attorney at the DOA was advising the Army Corps of Engineers staff who chaired the public hearings.
Most public hearings on the project, Fleischli reported, were “packed every day with speakers who carefully described their objections in factual, environmentally technical speeches.” At the permit hearing, Fleischli and other anti-convention center speakers used Army Corps’ data to show the inappropriate use of the site for a building, contending that U.S. and Wisconsin environmental laws “required that the landfill be cleaned up, not perpetuated as a source of lake and ground water contamination.” Their testimonies were disregarded and the permit was approved.
Fleischli filed a federal district court injunction appealing the permit–the fourth case she had filed by this point. Numerous attorneys, representing the city, DNR, Army Corps of Engineers, and DOA, as well as state attorney general staff, attended the hearing.
Fleischli wrote that “it appeared that the project, after the permit hearing, had added a new feature and pounded a 1000 foot interlocking barrier into the lake at the end of the project… it appeared they were recognizing the problem of increased and/or continuing contamination. Or it meant that they were worried that the entire dump would be scoured out into the lake. The barrier would not stop that leaching…the contaminants would only pile up. It might, instead, create a passive sink behind its wall as the shallow groundwater swirled around the 1700 pilings…the project violated the Clean Water Act and that the permit hearing was fatally flawed.”
The case was dismissed.
Can anything else hurt lake Monona? $67.1 million dollar “Mistake on the Lake” is built
Some city officials, in stark contrast to environmentalists, felt that Lake Monona’s horribly polluted state was a fait accompli, and any further pollution created by building Monona Terrace (which would fill in an acre of the lake) wouldn’t damage it any further. In July 1990, Wisconsin State Journal’s Susan Lampert Smith interviewed Bernard Saley, a retired Madisonian who had worked for the city health and engineering departments for forty-four years. He recalled seeing, as a child, the fence in the lake that kept garbage from floating out into the lake from the dump.
Saley also remembered “all the things that had been done to Lake Monona in the interests of improving it” including “tons of sodium arsenite—now known to be cancer-causing, as well as poisonous—that were dumped into Monona to kill lake weeds.”
He had applied some of these tons of pesticides himself during his city tenure. “Considering all the other things we’ve done to the lake,” he asked, “how could this harm it? We’d all like it to be Walden Pond, but it’s not.” In fact, he opined further, the center would be good for Madison because it would it “would give the park back to the general public” when at the moment “it’s given over to water-skiers.”
DNR’s water specialist discounted negative effects of the proposed center on fish habitat, explaining that the site “consists of steeply sloping fill that offers little refuge for fish” (this “steeply sloping fill” was the old dump). The city also proposed an “aquatic center” just east of the center that would fill four acres of lakeshore, which was a spawning ground for panfish.
Managing the contaminated sediments was another challenge. DNR surveys of Lake Monona sediments in the 1980s found “heavy pollution” in the lake bottom, raising concerns that construction on the lakeshore would stir up contaminants and “broadcast them again through the lake.” “The arsenic and copper compounds that Saley and other would-be weedkillers have dumped in the lake are still down there,” Lampert Smith wrote. “So are mercury compounds, PCBs, lead and cadmium from the days when Starkweather Creek and the lake itself served as dumping waters for Madison industries.” The DNR water specialist, however, was confident that “state of the art” strategies would “confine” all the sediments during construction.
A public referendum on the center narrowly passed in 1992 and construction began in 1994. The $67.1 million center, named the “Frank Lloyd Wright Monona Terrace,” was funded by City of Madison hotel room tax and bonds, the State of Wisconsin, Dane County and private sector contributions. It was finally completed till 1997—fifty-nine years after Frank Lloyd Wright first proposed the idea. Fortunately, the aquatic center wasn’t built.
Now, low income people of color eat fish living in dump leachates oozing from under Monona Terrace
Since the center was finished, the bike path in front of Monona Terrace–which activists fought for in order to maintain some public access to the lake–has been a favorite spot for shoreline subsistence anglers, especially for crappie and bluegill. Many of these anglers are African American, and a large number come from Milwaukee and other urban areas (Janesville, Beloit, etc) to fish there.
Again: What poisonous stew of chemicals and metals are leaching from that dump into the fish the anglers catch, eat, and feed to family and friends? Who knows? Nobody is measuring.
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Addendum:
Shocking city officials, after the Final Environmental Impact Statement on the center was released in August 1993, the local Sierra Club took a public stance against the center and began distributing “Don’t Pave the Lake” bumper stickers around Madison. City officials were taken by surprise, in part, because Sierra Club “environmental policy consultant” Caryl Terrell, also a Plan Commissioner and head of the city’s EIS scoping committee, had strongly and publicly endorsed the project. Sierra Club-Four Lakes Group chairman Al Matano, who worked for DNR—as did some other club members opposed to the project—said their “main focus will be to undo what the public erroneously sees as a “done deal.” Although much of the environmentalist opposition had been quiet up till then, he said, “[i]f nothing else, we’ll make a lot of people realize what’s happening and feel a little less helpless and put this city on notice that they will have to account for their actions.” On September 30, 1993 Matano and another Sierra Club leader wrote an op-ed in The Capital Times calling the EIS a whitewash and the whole EIS process a “mockery.”
[1] https://www.mononaterrace.com/experience-monona-terrace/frank-lloyd-wright/
[2] From Anne E. Fleischli, 2009. “Wha’ the…?! A bit of Madison, WI history, a dissident/activist’s experience. “On the reasons for the name “It Ain’t Wright” for the group that organized against the center, Fleischli wrote: “We formed a group to oppose the convention center that called itself It Ain’t Wright. The perfect name we thought. It wasn’t morally right to build it and it wasn’t a Frank. Frank had died, we pointed out. He wasn’t here to revise his drawings yet another time. Ah, the city assured everyone that no fraud was being perpetrated. It would always be clear that this was only the outline of one of Frank’s designs. It would never be marketed as a Frank. Of course, the city hired Frank’s former design studio Taliesin so it would be clear they could use Frank’s name. Fooling the public was one thing; violating use of trade names was another.”
Sadly, Anne Fleischli died of cancer several years ago. Her feisty, dissident spirit, knowledge, leadership and brilliant activist strategies are sorely missed by Madison environmental activists.
