Extending La Baskador Row

For pedestrians walking east on the downtown end of University Avenue, a familiar view of the Capitol is about to be lost. Last week, three houses on the last stretch of Gorham were torn down (with two getting carted away whole), to make way for the construction of The Equinox. It is the latest ten-stories plus student apartment to go up downtown, in the emerging neighborhood where the city's street grid axis shifts from southwest-northeast to a cardinal east-west.

As the downtown core of the Madison is redeveloped with greater density, the visual character of the city is changing with property assessments. The central landmark of the Capitol is also in the middle of many small clamors about these changes. For months, there has been grumbling about the new Dane County Justice Center, which partially obscures the skyline Capitol view for persons entering downtown via John Nolen Drive. Another Capitol-view controversy centers around Madison's latest bout of kitchen sink gigantism taking the form of architectural edifice, i.e., the proposed Archipelago Village.

The photo above displays another Capitol view about to disappear, at least for pedestrians in a foot-traffic heavy area. This shouldn't be read as a complaint about the change; increasing density to a reasonable extent downtown is an appropriate policy. It is a reflection, however, on Madison's ongoing transition from a big small city to a small metropolitan area.

This shift is also reflected in the mental geography of the city, in which Madison's student ghetto of the Animal House (set in '62) and counterculture generation acquires a new character. La Baskador Row, the cluster of self-described luxury student apartments sitting at the nexus of Gorham, Johnson, and Bassett, the latter of which was the onetime Ho Chi Minh Trail of the Midwest.

It is also characterized by the swelling of State Street. About a month ago, a look at some new restaurants on or just off State Street was published on Dane101. Most of these openings were located in a few square blocks, in a spur west of State where Gorham and Gilman traverse their final few blocks. Meanwhile, the growth of La Baskador Row comes with some new first-floor retail, notably the Copper Gables Café, which looks to be an escape route for Baker's Too when University Square gets redeveloped. With the Equinox going up, it looks like this spur will become a full-fledged lobe, and downtown retail will widen from the tether presently connecting the Square and the UW.

In a May 22 piece, State Journal columnist Susan Lampert Smith wrote about these changes, asking, Aren't students supposed to live in dingy hovels? The piece focused on a garage sale conducted by the Madison Environmental Group and Habitat for Humanity, selling and salvaging as much of the condemned buildings as possible.

Lampert Smith wrote;

What happened to student poverty?

We were proud of our student hovels. The scurrying cockroaches and clanking radiators were signs we had temporarily escaped our boring suburban upbringings.

Now, students have to have high-speed Internet and cable access, tiled gourmet kitchens, and top-grain leather furniture.

Are they spoiled or what?

Not mentioned in the column are the realities of changing student demographics on the UW campus, a result of higher tuition (in and out of state) and tighter acceptance rates. The UW-Madison undergraduate student body is becoming, as a whole, less reflective of the socio-economic diversity of Wisconsin's population, with more matriculating freshmen coming from the upper two quintiles of parental income in the last decade.

Lampert Smith aptly captured this current of time in the closing to her column, though. She quoted one of the last residents of the now-demolished hovels, speaking about his anticipation for nostalgia;

As is being increasingly recognized in multiple quarters, the city is undergoing a profound shift as significant as that thirty/forty years ago. Madisonians interested in promoting favored aspects of their civic home had best be aware of this.