Places: Castle, Prospect, and Washburn

While the neighborhood tour of Sunset Hills was mostly terra incognita for me, the tour I did a couple weeks later, Prospect and Castle, would tread familiar territory.

It was sprinkling as I walked from the bus stop to the meeting place but, when I arrived, there was a lovely double rainbow decorating the sky.

The meeting place? 

Built in the mid-1920s, it was renovated about 10 years later by the Civil Works Administration. You can see the contrasting architectural styles quite easily.

The newer bits are on the left.

I had no idea that Breese Stevens hosted the first night baseball game in the state. So I learned something almost immediately.

The first stop of the tour proper was Norris Court.

There was a cat on guard in the doorway of one of the businesses along E. Johnson to ensure that no one dared enter.

I think I was in one of the Norris Court Apartments apartments back in the 90s sometime. But I've walked through the courtyard many a time. A lovely place.

We proceeded to cross Gorham and begin an uphill trek on Castle Place. As we walked by the fourplex where a friend had lived, I recalled nights spent drinking beer there. Our guide directed us to Christ Presbyterian Church and told the tale of how the spot was once home to a castle.

I am struggling to recall the whole story. It was built around 1863 by an English(?) immigrant. But, as happens in life, things went pear-shaped for the guy and his extravagant residence was abandoned. The delapidated castle was eventually torn down in 1893, if memory servers.

At the top of Castle Place, we came to this house. 

It was once home to William T. Evjue, founder of The Capital Times newspaper here in Madison. We were told the story of how JFK and Jackie too visited Evjue in an attempt to convince the printman to have The Cap Times endorse Kennedy over Adlai Stevenson. This bid for approval failed but has left us with the legend that Jackie powdered her nose as the men haggled over politics. This story made the house a nice bookend to the Kennedy Pee Chronicles as JFK is reputed to have taken a leak at the Buckhorn Inn up in Spooner.

We came back down Castle Place and headed over to Prospect Place. This took us by this apartment building the name of which I cannot recall. But the guide said that Evjue lived there before he had his house built and that some stones were salvaged from the castle that now edge the building's gravel lawn.

Even more of the castle's stones were used in building another house down on Gorham, this charming abode with the hoopy turret.

There were a lot of homes on the tour built by Madison's dynamic architecture duo, Claude and Starck. I honestly cannot recall which ones, exactly, but I think if you choose a house in that area, you've got a better than 50% chance of it having been designed by Claude and Starck.

This little pocket neighborhood really reminded me of the neighborhood I grew up in down in Chicago. Mainly, I think, because of the Craftsman style homes. Well, that and the variety of architectural styles. Nothing cookie cutter here.

We traipsed down Russell Walk and learned that the homes were designed by a woman whose name I cannot recall. She was the lone female architect in Madison at the time - the 1930s, I believe.

Back in the mid-90s I knew a couple guys who lived in the brown house on the left. We played D&D and a friend and I attended a party there that has gone down in legend amongst him, his wife, and I. We drank ourselves sober at some point in the antelucan hours and kept going until well after dawn when we finally stumbled home.

It was not far for me as I lived just behind the party house on Washburn Place. I really loved the area, especially the Tudor Revival houses across the street. 

I lived in the top storey of a house with my girlfriend and I felt a bit blue when I saw the place that we had shared. That girlfriend was the first woman I ever fell in love with and the first with whom I lived in sin. A lot of memories flooded back and I replayed scenes of our relationship dissolving in my head. They were sadly resonant as I was in a marriage that was failing and it was brutally ironic that the relationships had a reason in common for their failures.

Note to self.

The final house we saw was designed and lived in by Louis W. Claude himself. Despite being a big dog architect, he made his home rather modest. A beautiful home but not ostentatious.

 

 

It was great to see all the lovely homes that I used to walk past every day and to learn about the history of the area which I was completely oblivious to 30 years ago when I lived there. We even got to go inside one of the homes that overlooked Lake Mendota. A lovely place full of wood trim and crown molding, it had a gorgeous view of the lake.

 

Now, which neighborhood tour to do next?