[People from Milwaukee fishing “the wall” at Monona Terrace in July 2022. Photo-Maria Powell]
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“Celebrity, swag, people and cash” are poisoning Black anglers; WSJ promotes it as diversity!
On Sunday the Wisconsin State Journal reached new heights as a PR arm of the Madison Chamber of Commerce, while also revealing great talent in doublespeak. Congratulations WSJ! You win our 1984 Orwell prize for 2022!
The first sentence of Dean Mosiman’s front page story about Monona Terrace, “Downtown set Wright” was “It’s brought celebrity, swag, people and cash.” Wow. How Chamber of Commerce can you get?
According to this Orwellian piece, Monona Terrace is also a playground of diversity, where privileged white Madisonians comingle with low income people of color: “Runners, walkers and cyclists heavily use the center’s waterfront path, and its retaining wall quickly became a hot fishing spot,” Mosiman gushed.
Building the center, the article implies, created a “hot fishing spot” for shoreline anglers, often Black people from Milwaukee and other nearby urban areas. What a great public service for these folks!
Toxic leaching landfill = “hot fishing spot”
As Wisconsin State Journal reporter Ron Seely wrote in 2007–and we also wrote about much more recently–the “hot fishing spot” is at the “retaining wall” of a leaching toxic landfill beneath Monona Terrace. Brilliant doublespeak!!
Seely wrote: “Even such a glittering landmark as the Monona Terrace sits atop garbage. Between 1946 and 1951, the lakeshore from which Monona Terrace now rises, part of Law Park, was a dump where trash from Downtown was simply shoved into the lake. The building rests on 1,750 steel pilings that were driven down through the compacted trash to the gravel and rock lake bed.” (Actually, these dates are off–the lakeshore dump was already there in the 1930s; My dad, born in the 30s, grew up on the bluff overlooking the lake, watching the city push garbage into it).
Ironically, tons of Madison newspapers fill this dump. In another section of his 2007 story, Seely cited David Benzchawel, who had just retired as a civil engineer for the city. Benzchawel, Seely explained, “spent more than 20 years compiling a map of the dozens of old dump sites scattered across the city of Madison.” Here’s an excerpt:
“The kind of garbage he dug up would often provide the clues Benzschawel needed to date the site. Some old locations, especially major historic disposal sites such as Law Park, contained lots of newspapers…That’s how we could tell the ages of the waste in some of these places,’ Benzschawel recalled. ‘You just pull the newspaper out and read the date.”
Activists who tried to stop Monona Terrace suspected that one reason the Evjue Foundation, the charitable arm of The Cap Times, generously funded and supported the center was to help cover up the dump and prevent the Cap Times (and presumably also the WSJ) from having to pay anything for cleanup.
Mosiman’s story doesn’t mention the landfill under the center at all.
Anglers love to fish at “the wall.” Do they know they are fishing from a landfill?
While doing my Master’s and PhD on fish consumption risks/risk communication at UW, and in the years afterwards when I co-founded MEJO with Northside subsistence anglers, I often rode my bike around Lake Monona and past Monona Terrace. Over the years I had many long conversations with anglers at what they called “the wall” right in front of the center–mostly people of color, usually from Milwaukee, Janesville, Beloit and other areas outside of Madison.
Did these anglers know they were fishing from a landfill? No. Of course not. Did they know about the mercury, PCBs, PFAS and other contaminants in the fish pulled from the “hot fishing spot”? No.
During MEJO’s many years of work with shoreline anglers and Public Health Madison Dane County (PHMDC) to improve fish advisory communication, especially with subsistence anglers, we asked that PHMDC place mercury and PCB advisory signs right at the wall where people fish. Was this ever done? No. Why?
We never received a clear explanation of why signs were not placed at the wall (something about difficulty attaching them to the concrete wall?), but we strongly suspect that the real reason was that city officials and Monona Terrace leaders did not want these signs to be highly visible to visitors of the center (the fishing wall is right outside the center’s windows) because they reflect how polluted Lake Monona and its fish are–and would tarnish the city’s shiny green reputation, not to mention possibly negatively affecting the money brought into the city and county by boat fishing, tourism and recreation.
When I was still a UW academic, I attended conferences at Monona Terrace, including the big international mercury conference in 2006, where scientists from all over the world shared data on mercury health risks, including mercury in fish, for several days. I presented a talk there myself.
While we were inside sharing powerpoints on these risks, Black people were outside the windows pulling mercury-laden fish from Lake Monona right outside the window–but nobody talked about that.
Well, except me. I mentioned this in my talk at the conference, and the response was…total silence. Blank stares. It was surreal.
PFAS at the “hot fishing spot”
In 2018-2019, the highly toxic “forever chemicals” called PFAS reared their ugly heads. Though PFAS compounds were in the lakes and fish for decades prior, they hadn’t been measured.
Crappies and bluegills, the fish most people go there to catch, are small but tend to build up high levels of PFOS, one of the most toxic PFAS compounds.
In 2019, State Journal reporter Chris Hubbuch wrote a story about significant levels of PFAS that spewed from the MGE fire that summer into a large city storm drain discharging in Law Park, just east of the retaining wall. (The title on the map with the story, above left, should say Lake Monona not Lake Mendota.)
Hubbuch talked to and photographed an angler, Georgia Gordon, from Beloit.
Under the headline “Anglers Unaware,” Hubbuch wrote (all text in italics is verbatim from his article):
Georgia Gordon, who was fishing Tuesday morning from the path in front of Monona Terrace, said she comes up a couple of times a year from Beloit to fish Lake Monona.
Gordon, 83, said she’s been fishing along the lake for years, catching mostly bluegills and crappies that she takes home to cook.
She hadn’t heard about the transformer explosion or concerns about contamination.
“Is it OK to eat?” she asked. “Maybe I better go home.”
Doug Voegeli, director of environmental health for Public Health Madison & Dane County, said the primary public health concern would be the buildup of PFAS in fish tissue, but the department doesn’t yet have any data to trigger a warning.
“Is it limited right there? Is it all Lake Monona? Where does it stop?” Voegeli said. “We just have no idea. We need those solid numbers to come back.”
In the meantime, Voegeli advises people to follow the consumption guidance for PCBs and mercury, which suggest children and pregnant women should not eat pan fish more than once a week.
His statement proved wrong. In January 2020, PFAS results for Madison lakes and fish were released by DNR. High enough PFAS levels were found in Lake Monona to require PFAS advisories. “The Department of Health Services recommends limiting consumption of carp, largemouth bass, walleye and perch from those water bodies to once a month. The department says it is safe to eat bluegill once a week.” Some fish they tested had up to 180,000 ppt of PFOS.
Many anglers have told me over the years that they eat several bluegills and crappies in each meal (an individual panfish isn’t enough for a meal). The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection recommends that vulnerable groups (children and all women of childbearing age) not eat fish with PFOS concentrations over 17 ppb.
All of the fish tested in Lake Monona had levels well over 17 ppb, but health agencies in Wisconsin have not issued special advisories for vulnerable groups. New Jersey is more proactive and protective than Madison and Wisconsin?
As for the MGE PFAS spill, and what levels spread into the lake and fish, nobody measured the water and/or fish near the outfall pipe after the initial release. Apparently, everyone forgot about it. How much PFAS are anglers at the wall eating? Nobody knows.
Monona Terrace: One big happy multi-racial recreational area? Or glaring race and class disparities?
In my many conversations with anglers at “the wall,” I usually asked them why they fished there. Most said that in addition to enjoying fishing, the fish provided food for their families, and they shared fish with neighbors and friends back in the economically challenged urban areas where they live. Many proudly showed their buckets full of bluegills and crappies and talked about backyard fish fries.
It was great to hear these stories. But some of these conversations also dispelled the happy diversity myth promoted by Mosiman’s article–that the scene at the fishing wall is of bikers and joggers (almost entirely white) and anglers (almost entirely people of color) recreating together happily.
In fact, several anglers told me how some bikers tried to shut down shoreline fishing at the center because they were purportedly concerned about fishing hooks snagging them in their sleek neon biker outfits (or fit bodies) while they rode by the center. Anglers and their children also got in their way, so they had to slow down, which annoyed the bikers because they wanted to ride fast.
At one point some years back, some bikers organized an effort to shut down shoreline fishing at the wall, claiming it was a safety issue. The effort was reportedly supported by Monona Terrace employees, who apparently didn’t like the fishing there either. Though not explicitly stated, no doubt Monona Terrace management and employees weren’t thrilled about the idea that convention center guests, drinking fancy cocktails at weddings or hobnobbing at conferences, might gaze out center windows and see Black people drinking Budweiser, hooking worms and hauling in buckets of crappies.
Fortunately, these disturbing efforts to shut down fishing at the wall failed. But the race and class tensions no doubt remain.
Beyond these biker-angler tensions, the same race and class disparities that permeate privileged Madison–especially downtown–are glaringly obvious at Monona Terrace. Do these Black anglers and other anglers of color feel welcome inside Monona Terrace? Can they afford to eat with their families at the rooftop restaurant? Can they afford to be among the “millions of people from all walks of life” who “have gathered and celebrated their happiest moments” at the center, as Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway highlighted? Very unlikely.
In sum, here’s the picture about the Monona Terrace “wall” that the WSJ will never paint: While privileged white people are inside drinking costly cocktails and eating expensive gourmet food, low income and mostly Black people are outside catching fish to feed their families from a toxic leaching landfill, with mostly white bikers and joggers zooming by behind them, unhappy about their presence.
But never mind! Doublespeak is so handy in this situation. Just ignore these painfully obvious race and class disparities and promote Monona Terrace as a Madison success story in nurturing diversity and multiculturalism!
The WSJ article almost entirely ignores the long history of community concerns and advocacy about the environmental effects of Monona Terrace
Mosiman fleetingly mentions previous concerns about loss of “green space” and “the building’s impact on the lake” as controversies before the center was finally built, but says no more. Beyond these few words, the article doesn’t discuss any of the the community’s legitimate concerns about the toxic landfill under Law Park, the center’s effects on the lake and fish, loss of park space and fishing access, impacts of all the impervious surfaces on lake water quality, and more–forget about the hard work community activists did to attempt stopping the center because of these concerns (described in more detail in our previous article.)
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.”
Community activists opposing Monona Terrace also advocated for a city referendum to keep shoreline parks accessible to the public. This passed, resulting in an ordinance that meant the city had to place a bike path between the center and the lake, which allowed continued shoreline fishing access. [1]
Was this an ideal outcome for anglers, the lake and the community? Not really. Center opponents would have preferred to keep the public green space along the lake, with no giant building and parking lots. This would have been much better for the lake and the anglers. But the public access bike path was a small consolation prize for losing the battle to stop the center. Nevertheless, without their work, there wouldn’t be any fishing or public access at “the wall” at all.
What happened to the community’s environmental concerns after the battle was lost and the center was built? Mosiman simply says that “Environmental concerns faded” and then touts the building’s “coveted LEED Platinum status for sustainability practices” and, even more oddly, says the center received “a separate certification for comprehensive infectious disease protocols.” What do these have to do with the community’s concerns about loss of green space, the toxic landfill, effects on the lake and fishing?
Seemingly to address the concern about loss of public fishing access, he also added that Monona Terrace’s “retaining wall attracts a diverse group of anglers every day during the warmer months”–making it sound like this was the result of Monona Terrace and/or city leaders’ efforts to welcome and serve the diverse shoreline fishing community. This is especially ironic and disingenuous given that the public access on the bike path only happened because of community advocacy by center opponents.
Finally, frosting on the cake, Mosiman quotes an angler at the wall to prop up the doublespeak: “I’ve been coming here for years,” said Donald Brown of Milwaukee, who returns three or four times a month, sometimes with friends or family. “People call it ‘the wall.’ It has the reputation of catching goodsize bluegill and crappies. It’s good fishing here in Madison.”
Environmental concerns “faded”?
So is it true that “environmental concerns faded”? No. Once the center was built, community activists opposed to it were defeated, demoralized, and exhausted. Other than concerns about the toxic landfill and questions about what stew of poisons it was leaching into lakes and fish, most of their concerns were now moot. Too late. The green space they wanted to keep was gone and the area was covered in parking lots and concrete.
But the toxic leachates did not “fade” or disappear. After the landfill was built, the city, county and DNR have simply ignored questions about what was (and is still) leaching from the landfill into the lakes, fish, and anglers’ bodies–relying on the age-old approach to making these toxics concerns go away: don’t measure them and they’re not there! It works every time.
Monona Terrace is fabulous for the “psyche of the city”
Under the heading “Psyche of a City,” Mosiman wrote, “The ripple effects and city growth since Monona Terrace’s opening are staggering”–and then elaborated at great length about all the ways the center has triggered growth and development and the how property assessments downtown have skyrocketed.
Apparently the “psyche of the city” = $$. At least that’s not doublespeak. It’s true, and has been since Madison’s founding, as I have described here and here.
At the end of the article, under the heading “More to Come”, Mosiman wrote that “despite its panache, Monona Terrace has constraints,” citing a consulting firm study saying that the center needs to expand by 42,250 square feet to be on par with “its competition…all over the state and country” where cities are building many “new or expanded facilities, wedding barns, and other event spaces.”
What about the health of Lake Monona? People who eat the fish?
Few (if any?) other event spaces in the state and country are on top of a landfill in a lake that is a prized fishing destination for boat and shore anglers.
But who cares, when the ripple effects of the center have been “staggering” for Madison’s economy and growth?
What “ripple effects” has the center (and the landfill beneath it) had on the lakes? On the anglers and their families who have caught and consumed lots of fish from there? Nobody knows. Nobody has assessed these effects. Does anyone care besides us? Apparently not.
As for the “ripple effects” of city growth on Lake Monona and other lakes, they will be nothing but bad. The lakes will get more polluted and more contaminants will be drawn into city drinking water wells.
So in addition to poisoning shoreline anglers now, these decisions will poison everyone who lives here over the longer term, in the name of money, the “psyche of the city.”
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[1] In the 2010s, the city council repealed the shoreline parks public access ordinance so the Thai Pavilion could be built in Olbrich Park, also on the shore of Lake Monona.
