There's a Tumblr called Sleazy Madison which features nothing but newspaper ads. Most of them are for X-rated films at theaters and for strip clubs like this one.
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"What's
new in Madison?" is a question I hear a lot from friends and family. The first thing that comes to mind now that we no longer have Scott Walker
actively trying to screw over Madison and Milwaukee at every turn is that
Madison continues to grow.
Our
population seems to gain 3,000 people, give or take a couple hundred, every
year. While it's not Sun Belt level of population growth, it is growth
nonetheless. If things didn't dramatically change last year because of the
virus, we're sitting at 261,000-262,000 people. By no means a metropolis but
nicely medium-sized.
For all the problems growth brings with it, it's much better than to be hemorrhaging population. I was in St. Louis back in 2017 with some friends and there was much to recommend it. For example, we ate some wonderful barbeque at Pappy's Smokehouse and drank some great beer at Urban Chestnut. Plus there's that arch thingy and the Old Courthouse across the street from it. And it's on the Mighty Mississippi with all that history. St. Louis was the gateway to the West back in the day, after all. But it was really depressing to see all of the vacant buildings with their windows boarded up wherever we went.
We ate at a
restaurant south of downtown in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood. The street was
lined with red brick 4 flats and every other one was boarded up on the 2 blocks
we walked. The city has lost about two-thirds of its population since the 1950s
so it's no surprise that there are so many empty buildings. A lovely city in
many ways but depressing in others.
Madison is
the opposite of St. Louis. With a growing population and a fair number of IT/biomedical
jobs, there are a lot of apartments going up with studios often going for
$1,200+/month. It seems crazy that people are paying in rent roughly the same
amount as my monthly mortgage payment. Different strokes for different folks, I
guess. The average home value in the city is now north of $300,000. Not in the
same league as Seattle or San Francisco, I grant you, but that's a good chunk
of change in these parts.
For a taste of all the building going on around town, check out this article.
It focuses
on the area to the northeast of the Capitol on E. Washington, a.k.a. – Highway
151, and includes some before and after photos. In addition to the new
buildings documented in the article, there's more to come in that corridor.
E.g. - new offices in the picture immediately below and more apartments in the following
one.
It's hard to
keep up with all of the new buildings even though Madison is fairly small as
developers practice their diablerie on every side of town. Every time I bike
through neighborhoods where I lived in a student slum while I was in college,
it's ever more gentrified. (But we're woefully short on "affordable"
housing which is another hot topic these days.)
But that's
what living in the city is all about, right? The churn of people and places and
ideas with the familiar giving way to the new and the novel.
There's been a little comfort to be had lately as a couple new ghost signs have emerged from the rubble.
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