The north side of Starkweather Park is bounded by Highway 30. Underneath the overpass the Marsh View path, Starkweather Creek, and rail tracks owned by Wisconsin & Southern all converge, more or less. There was the obligatory graffiti everywhere. "Kode" was painted everywhere. Sagacious advice like "Eat pussy not animals" was interspersed among words and shapes I could not discern.
Graffiti aside, the overpass was rather neat. Sun and shade made for some striking contrasts while the overpass and the rails created a neat tableau of harsh lines.
The scene reminded me of The Conformist. Any Vittorio Storaro fans out there?
I took the rail tracks southwest and encountered a rail switch which looked to be manual. Not being an expert in rail infrastructure, I wasn't sure. But a friend of mine who drives trains for a living has told me stories about rail infrastructure in use today that engineers who voted for Grover Cleveland would have used. This switch directs trains to a siding that runs most of the way to Fair Oaks Avenue.
Along the siding were two platforms with a ramp on one side.
Presumably freight was taken off of rail cars here at some point in the past. As you can see from the top photograph, the area beyond the ramps is a grass field along with a retention pond that's out of view. Google Maps show this spot as being wooded so the clearing was done fairly recently. There's also a gravel road that runs to Jacobson Avenue parallel with the tracks. Besides the trees, Google Maps also shows a Stock Avenue here running one short block north-south to the end of Commercial Avenue which has a stretch that runs south of Highway 30 as well as north of it. I wonder if this area was more industrial/commercial in the past. There is very little commercial to Commercial Avenue here and a lot of the houses look like they date from the 1950s. I'd bet that this area pre-war looked a lot different. Surely Highway 30 got a big facelift when the interstates were constructed too.
Once you go west you enter a little section of the Town of Blooming Grove. I believe the City of Madison will annex this and other bits of the town in 2027. If you go through this area, you'll notice how the street signs are blue instead of green. There are some nice older homes here in amongst the ones from the 1950s and 60s. This one caught my eye.
Unbeknownst to me there was an artist residency at Thurber Park.
I suspected this was a repurposed Trachte shed but didn't spy a nameplate. However, there was a verified Trachte shed just down Fair Oaks Avenue.
I presume it's storage for one of the businesses there.
I took the long route home, going through O.B. Sherry Park. On the way there I found a utility pole that got a lot of love from the neighbors.
I had intended to wander the park a bit but the ground was much too wet. And so I wandered along Starkweather Creek which was looking pretty good, lacking the PFAS foam that we'll no doubt see in a couple of months. Instead there were mallards everywhere.
A couple blocks from home I spied a feline taking in the sun.
My hope is to walk this route again when there is more foliage and I have my binoculars with me so I can peer deeper into the marsh and see more birds. The plan is also to learn how to use this camera, specifically manual focus. I've got a whole pandemic to figure it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment