What’s the saying? Some things never change?
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1921: In America’s “Model City,” Lake Monona is “a cistern for foul toads to know and gender in”
In the midst of increasingly contentious public debates and news articles about how to deal with failing sewage plants, horrific stench, weeds, and garbage, in 1921, under a large banner headline in the State Journal–“The World’s Most Beautiful Capital City”–a long piece by Madison attorney, university regent, and philanthropist Michael Olbrich began with a quotation from John Nolen’s “Model City” plan: “Of all the cities in the United States, it appears to me that Madison has the best opportunity to become in the future…a model modern American city. It has the site, the environment, the climate, the population, the high civic spirit, the traditions, the permanent attractions of government and higher education…It is within the power of the people of Wisconsin to make Madison in the future what Geneva is today—a beautiful, well-ordered, free, organic city.”
Olbrich’s piece was a passionate call to Madison leaders and residents to live up to Nolen’s dream for the city. The subheading under the quotation above was: “Wanted: Vigorous and Inspired Civil Leadership.” He called specifically for people willing to follow the example of the great civic leader John M. Olin. Under the next heading–“Are we equal to our opportunity?”—he wrote, referring to Olin, “[h]is example is a constant challenge to action.”
Before outlining action steps, however, Olbrich issued harsh, scathing critiques of Madison’s complacency and smugness: “Our conduct almost suggests that we have misinterpreted the expression “Madison: A Model City” to mean that a great arbiter of civic excellence had awarded us the palm of supreme distinction among cities and set the seal of his approval upon full and final accomplishment.” He argued that Nolen’s title “Model City” was not “selected in the vein of effusive compliment,” but that this sentence in his report– “as a beautiful city Madison has a present tendency not upward but downward”—reflected Nolen’s intended message. “Those words were true then,” Olbrich wrote, and “Unfortunately they are truer now.”
After waxing poetic about the beauty of Lake Monona (“so lovely fair” and “Providence surely was in a prodigal humor when she fashioned this miracle Monona”) Mr. Olbrich admitted that “the course of our development has drifted from the poet’s dream.” The main focus of his ire was not, however, the failed sewage plants or industrial wastes going into the lakes, but all the railroads criss-crossing the city, some traveling right next to the lake. Sounding a bit like Henry David Thoreau in his hatred for railroads and train locomotives, he wrote: “As if under compulsion of some monster of antique myth,” city leaders had “consented or conspired in the construction of a great loom of death across whose frame of steel are shunted to and fro in constant oscillation the thunderous shuttles of destruction” that “disgrace our water front and humble our civic spirit.”
Olbrich also quoted Nolen’s words of disgust about lakeshore fishing shacks near the capitol, many likely occupied by people without the means for better housing and dependent on fish for food and/or money. His Nolen quotations, and his own words, reflected open disdain for the poor: “As if our shame were not complete, that saving element of dignity was sacrificed by the addition of the grotesque horror of a squalid succession of shacks and shanties…as if the horrors of our conduct must still ‘on horrors head accumulate’ the cup of degradation already filled to the brim was set to overflowing and this priceless chalice of beauty and grace designed for love and adoration was transformed for entire seasons at a time into a cesspool of loathsome slime and stench—quoting Nolen, ‘a cistern for foul toads to know and gender in.’” The piece featured two photos of the fishing shacks prominently at the top of the front page article.
In regards to Lake Monona’s state, he said: “Her beauty assassinated ‘in the very eye,’ blinded, bedraggled, protest against the indignity she has suffered at the hands of man. A partial realization of the enormity of the offense should pale the pimpled rash of our civic conceit and stifle once for all the perennial hiccough of our self-satisfaction.”
What should Madison do? Fill shorelines with garbage, build parks and highways over them
Olbrich proposed some solutions to Madison’s shameful lake horrors. Notably, he did not mention the inadequate Burke sewage treatment plant’s effluents into Lake Monona, or the dredging and channelizing of Starkweather Creek.
In addition to the prompt removal of all of the lakeshore fishing shacks, Mr. Olbrich supported the “public health” recommendations of city experts Burdick and Alvord—using dredged materials from the lakes to fill in areas between the tracks and the lakeshore and locating public parks on top of these fill areas. Deepening the lakes by dredging, they said, would prevent algal and weed growth.
Also, Olbrich noted, “the present city engineer suggests that the area for dumping the accumulated waste of our streets is so fast disappearing that in the near future the problem of a place of disposition in an economical and convenient manner is likely to grow acute. He suggests that the city should acquire the riparian rights outside the railroad tracks to make provision for a dumping ground.” In other words, the city should fill in the riparian areas of the lakes with city garbage.
Olbrich also repeated a city engineer’s recommendation that the city should build “a low grade or level highway across which our heavy traffic may be transported so as to avoid the hills within the city proper and relieve the congestion upon the present city streets. Such highway would find its natural place either just inside or outside the present railroad tracks and would not in any way interfere with the full development of the plan.”
In concluding his essay, Olbrich passionately asked, “Have We the Burning Will?” and answered his question with a section titled “We Can and We Will” that again touted Madison’s “high civic spirit,” which is easy to kindle into “fires of high devotion” to make these dreams come true. Many of them did come true, though it took much longer than Olbrich hoped—and he didn’t live to see them come to fruition.
(Olbrich died of the flu in 1929, and the shoreline park at the “east end,” built on top of dredged sediments and trash, was named after him.)
The above is an excerpt from a longer piece by Maria Powell. Please do not cite without attribution.
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What happened in the hundred years after Olbrich passionately implored the highly “civic minded” residents and leaders of America’s “Model City” to kindle their “fires of high devotion” to create “a beautiful, well-ordered, free, organic city”? In line with Olbrich’s dreams, many shoreline parks were indeed created on top of polluted sediments dredged from the lakes, along with trash and various residential, commercial and industrial wastes. As for Lake Monona? Peruse some of these articles and judge for yourself.
Yet in 2021, city’s leaders and highly educated, privileged residents are as smug and pretentious as ever. Most environmental pollution is downplayed, denied or ignored. Despite some lip service to the contrary, city leaders’ marginalization and at times disdain for the plights of low (or no) income people struggling to survive financially (or even just to have a roof over their heads and enough to eat) are as deep as ever, amidst widening class and race disparities that increased during the pandemic…
