Madison Melancholy

It was quite a change going from 4 days at WisCon to nearly a week on my own. At loose ends, as it were. As I mentioned the other day, I had a few plans and saw some friends, but mostly I've had time to myself.

This has been a mixed blessing.

Like going to visit my folks in the Boston area, visiting Madison brings me to a strong realization of how some things in my life are in the past. I don't live here anymore, and there were many things about Madison that I liked (and also some that I disliked). So the nostalgia makes me sad, even though I know I focus too much on the good things that are gone without recognizing that the past wasn't all wine and roses, as it were.

I think this is related to two other facets of my personality:

1. I'm reluctant in general to consider moving back to somewhere I've lived before. I don't have much interest in moving back to Boston, which seems a strange and alien place to me now. I certainly don't want to return to New Orleans (I didn't care for it much when I went to college there). And I have a hard time seeing myself returning to Madison, unless I effected some other major change in my life (stopped working in the tech sector, for instance).
2. I often feel like I don't measure up to whatever challenges I'm facing in my life today (and consequently am in frequent and irrational fear of being laid off, fired, losing my friends, etc.). However, I often feel like I end up being well-suited to past challenges several years after experiencing them. Obviously this largely has to do with the benefit of hindsight and the fact that by-and-large I've met these challenges, so of course I'm better-suited for them now. It still tickles my perfectionist bone(s) making me feel like I just haven't been as capable in my life as I ought to have been.

This is a lot to dredge up while I'm (mostly) relaxing on vacation. Maybe I would do better making my Madison trips a Tuesday-to-the-following-Thursday thing around WisCon, rather than having all of WisCon followed by a big block of empty time. I dunno.

Anyway, with all of that rather sad preamble, I've been going around the city taking photos of some things that mean something to be in Madison, and I wanted to share them with you.

Madison is the capitol city of the state of Wisconsin. Downtown - including the capitol building - is located on an isthmus between two lakes, Mendota and Monona (with two other lakes nearby). The isthmus runs southwest-to-northeast, and the city has a notional "west side" (including the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and "east side". This little photo-essay starts on Monroe Street, southwest of the capitol, and runs northeastward towards State Street (the downtown business district) and the capitol.

Capital City Comicswas my comics shop of choice for nearly the entire time I lived in Madison, 1991-1999. When I first moved there, it competed with Westfield's Comics Etc., 20th Century Books, and a left-wing bookstore and comics shop on State Street (whose name I've forgotten). The last has gone out of business, and I think 20th Century is mostly just doing Internet sales these days. (Once it moved from its downtown location it seemed to lose focus.) Capital City is a little more Bohemian in nature than the yuppie-esque Westfield. Despite a brief closure due to problems with the IRS in the late 90s, it's been basically the same solid comics shop for as long as I can remember.

A few doors north of Capital City Comics was a grocery store named Ken Kopp's Fine Foods. They were noted for their butcher and meat selection. I'm sorry to say I never even walked in the door of the place, despite only living a few blocks away while in graduate school. As you can see from the photo, they've gone out of business sometime in the last 4 years. Eerie. Looking in the window, the venue actually looks pretty large. But given the rampant growth in Madison lately, it wouldn't surprise me if it gets rezoned and plowed under for a new development.

East of Monroe Street and just south of Regent Street is South Randall Avenue. This photo is of 20 South Randall, which was my home for the three years I was in graduate school.

I flew to Madison around March or April of 1991 to look for an apartment. I was pretty well burned out after a hard year in school (which begs the question of why I immediately went on to graduate school, doesn't it?), and did not do a very good job looking. I got pretty lucky though, moving in with a chemical engineering grad student named Doug Dee (not to be confused with Doug Dea, a high school classmate of mine). The landlord was excellent (I've always been pretty lucky with my landlords), the rent was decent ($480/month for the place), and it was only a 5-minute walk from the CS department. The place was small, but it was good enough. I've always tended to value location over space, despite being a collector.

The first floor was all one apartment, while the second floor had a two-bedroom apartment in front and a one-bedroom in back. Doug and I had the top front apartment, with the balcony you can see in the photo above. The balcony was just large enough to sit on and read while watching people walk by. It even had a parking space! It doesn't look like much from the outside, but inside it had wood floors, and the landlord was gradually overhauling the kitchens and bathrooms, and he supplied some decent furniture (couches and beds). So it was actually a hassle-free deal. Doug got married after 2 years and moved out, and my friend Ed Kearns moved in with me when he moved to Madison for his two-year grad school stint. (We've been friends ever since.)

I always have a rough transition when I move to a new locale. I get bitterly depressed and lonely for as long as a year after moving. My first year in grad school was crushing (not to mention that I broke up with my college girlfriend, Kathleen, when I graduated and moved to Madison). In retrospect I don't know how I made it through. Things got better the next year when I briefly dated and then became friends with my friend Karen, and better still the next year when I discovered fantasy baseball and started dating Colleen. It was a rough time, though.

On the walk from my apartment to the CS department was a mostly-disused railroad. In the last 4 years the railroad has been pulled out and paved into a bike and pedestrian trail. The left photo above shows the beginning of this trail, at North Randall Ave. The right photo shows the view in the other direction - not paved, some rails still in evidence, but only used by pedestrians. Apparently the path runs for many miles to the southwest. It would have been great to have had it when I was biking to work in Madison. I'm glad they built it.

The computer science department at UW-Madison, my place of employment and generally busy-bodiness for 3 years. Not much to look at, is it? The building is about 15 years old. From what I've heard, they were prohibited from building the building in anticipation of future growth, and thus it was horribly cramped the whole time I was there. How silly.

So it's a Starbucks... so? Well, it's a two story Starbucks. This storefront used to be a Wendy's.

The Espresso Royale cafe on State Street, my coffee shop of choice when I lived in Madison. I was a little disappointed that Madison had adopted the Seattle model of coffeehouse rather than the New Orleans model, whose dark atmosphere seemed more stylish and romantic, but oh well. I went to the Espresso Royale primarily because they served the best coffee. In the winter if the cafe was too crowded (rare; I computed that on average a table would open up every 6 or so minutes, so I'd wait) I'd go to the Cafe Assisi up the street, which had worse coffee but better atmosphere. The Cafe Assisi has since closed. The other popular coffee shops were Victor Allen's and the Steep and Brew, both of which had the downsides of closing earlier than the first two.

The Chocolate Shoppe, a Madison institution. Very yummy ice cream. They have a sign up inside which basically says, "If you want low-fat, low-carb, healthy food, then go somewhere else!" I was amused. If the Chocolate Shoppe had closed I would have started doubting the sanity of Madison.

B-Side, my record store of choice when I was in Madison. It has an excellent jazz selection, which was good because I lived in town when I got into jazz in the late 90s. It's smaller than The Exclusive Company down the street, but has a nicer, more interesting atmosphere, and often better prices (or did when I lived in town). They got a lot of my money.

The Fair Trade Coffee House, where I've been spending my hanging-out time on my vacation. They have free wireless and are a bit closer to where I'm staying than the Espresso Royale. And their coffee ain't bad, either! The Espresso Royale has eliminated my favored seats at the front of the store (so I can watch people walking by on State Street) and replaced them with a couch, which was an additional incentive to find somewhere else to go.

Jamba Juice on State Street, formerly a Victor Allen's. I almost fell over when I saw there was a Jamba Juice in Madison. I thought they were pretty much just a California thing. Looking at their Web site I see they've actually penetrated a couple dozen states. Who knew?

Pizzeria Uno off State Street. Notable only for nostalgia's sake: It was the first restaurant I ate at when I visited Madison in 1991 when I was considering going there for graduate school. I used to be a huge fan of Pizzeria Uno, and New Orleans didn't have any, so going there seemed like a no-brainer at the time.

Parthenon Gyros, one of my favorite eateries when I lived in Madison. My Friday night routine often consisted of going to Parthenon's and then going to the Espresso Royale. In retrospect, I was in a rut. In the present day, I had a gyro during WisCon. I think I actually like the gyro places I patronize in California a bit better now.

The old civic center has been all but demolished to make way for the new Overture Center. The local weekly paper, the Isthmus, notes that the Overture Center has been riddled with controversy regarding their funding. The old Civic Center wasn't much, but it was okay (there's an old Madison saw that when they were planning the Civic Center they had a choice of two classic theatres to renovate for it, and they chose the wrong one; the other theatre became the Orpheum). I saw Nanci Griffith perform at the Civic Center about 10 years ago.

The other end of the block is the completed part of the Overture Center. I didn't go inside, but apparently it's pretty impressive.

And now the really sad segment of this entry: This used to be a great art supply store, which I patronized often (though my art skills have probably atrophied through disuse by now), and it's clearly closed. Replacing it with a Ben & Jerry's doesn't seem like a big improvement, especially with several other ice cream parlors on State Street.

This used to be a great two-level bookstore called Bookworks. This photo is an example of the collapse of many downtown bookstores. Other than Bookworks, an SF and fantasy store named Alternate Realities is gone, as well as McDermott's Books (which, under its previous ownership, was Medler's Books, the first bookstore I visited in Madison; its original storefront is a Subway now). And Shakespeare's Books has cut its floor space in half. Canterbury Bookshop and Coffeehouse has gone out of business, and Avol's (which owned Alternate Realities) has moved into part of its space. There are signs saying that Bookworks will be moving into the other part of its space, but I don't know how true that is.

Downtown Madison is undergoing a great deal of gentrification and construction, and I guess a lot of small businesses have gotten priced out of the area. It's really too bad, as they were a big part of what made downtown so worthwhile. Worst of all, Pegasus Games no longer has a downtown store, only their west side store on Odana. At their peak, around 1997, their downtown store was the best gaming store I've ever been to. Game Haven has picked up some of the slack, but it's not really the same.

At least the coffee house business is doing well. Victor Allen's is gone, as is Cafe Assisi, but despite two Starbucks moving into downtown, the other small coffee houses are mostly still there, and have added a couple other houses as well.

The Wisconsin state capital building, as seen from State Street.

Lastly, my other apartment building in Madison, at 444 West Wilson Street, 4 blocks from the state capital, and about 6 blocks from most of where I went on State Street. It was also about 2 blocks from Lake Monona and the bike path running along the lake.

This building went up a few months before I moved in in August 1994, and I was the first one to live in my apartment. It was one of the first of the new wave of modern apartment buildings for professions (rather than students) in Madison. I like to joke that it was "the most expensive one bedroom in town", at $715-$750 per month during the period I lived there, with underground parking, laundry in most units, and central heat and air. My unit is (was) around the corner to the right, on the third floor. The only downside was that I didn't have much of a view.

And in fact, here's a shot of the windows and balcony of my old place, from the outside.

A lot of memories in this apartment: Dating Colleen, breaking up with Colleen, getting my cats, hosting book discussions, letting my cats into the hallway to meet my friend Jim's cats down the hall. The biggest downside to the location was the dearth of parking for people coming to visit.

I lived there for about four-and-a-half years. The landlord was the commercial company Urban Land Interests, and they were very responsible and responsive landlords. My heat went out one day during the winter, and I called their emergency line. They couldn't fix it that night, but the guy on duty brought over a pair of space heaters which got me through the night. In some ways I do miss the place.

So those are some scenes of Madison. There's a lot of stuff missing: Epic Systems, where I worked for four and a half years. The lakes, although I walked along Lake Monona today and it was green with algae and was experiencing an ugly-looking fishkill (and smelled horrible). The Monona Terrace Convention Center (a.k.a. "The Wedding Cake on the Lake"). Memorial Union. Michael's Frozen Custard. The UW Arboretum. Etc. etc. But this is a pretty good dent in some places that have or had some meaning to me.

I hope you've enjoyed.