Lessons From Law Park

KATHRYN A. KAHLER

Kathryn A. Kahler is associate editor of Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine.

More than 25,000 Madison commuters and visitors to the capital city drive past it each day. They might know the narrow strips of land surrounding the Frank Lloyd Wright Monona Terrace as Law Park, but most don’t know it was once part of Lake Monona’s lakebed.

The vision to expand Lake Monona’s shoreline sprung from several key Madison figures. According to a historical marker at the park, James R. Law, Madison’s mayor from 1932 to 1943, planned to move the shoreline 200 feet into the lake to make way for the downtown park.

Law wasn’t the only one with this vision. The expanded Lake Monona shoreline was part of the dreams and plans for Madison drawn up in the early 1900s by Wright and other famed urban and park planners, in- cluding James Doty, John Olin, John Nolen and Ladislas Segoe.

Creating the new land required years of planning and preparation, though not necessarily through the means we’d use today. Newspaper accounts over the years say Law Park was a dumpsite for trash, appliances and building debris from the 1930s until 1951. Though this occurred more than two decades before state laws were enacted to regulate solid and hazardous waste sites, Law Park is still considered a historic waste site.

According to the DNR’s remediation and redevelopment database, the park became a superfund site in 1995 after a hazardous substance discharge occurred there. The dumping created a permanent waste site stretching more than a third of a mile along the shoreline, which could potentially damage the environment in the future if not properly managed.

Law Park can be viewed as a teaching moment for environmental history. Today’s landfills in Wisconsin do not resemble the landfills or dump sites of days past, thanks to knowledge acquired and regulatory safeguards put in place.

Today, the southern gateway to Madison, encompassing the John Nolen causeway and Lake Monona waterfront footage at Olin and Law parks, is back in the spotlight.

In March 2022, city planners kicked off a design challenge to come up with a plan to transform the corridor to be more welcoming for city visitors and one that connects urban neighborhoods with the lakefront.

Last summer, planners chose a trio of internationally known urban planners — Sasaki Associates, Agency Landscape and Planning, both of Massachusetts, and New York’s James Corner Field Operations — to develop plans for consideration. The firms were tasked with creating “a visionary, inclusive and environmentally focused master plan for 1.7 miles of shoreline and 17 acres of Madison’s foremost public lakefront.”

According to the Friends of Nolen Waterfront, the plans also address improvement of “Lake Monona’s water quality and aquatic habitat … and preserve Lake Monona’s cultural history from the Ho-Chunk nation to the present day.”

Besides water quality, the planning committee mandated that proposals address a host of other environmental issues, including fish life cycle concerns, from spawning at the lake’s edge to deep water fishing; the effect of shoreline filling on storm events, flooding and nutrient load; and goose management.

The three proposals were presented to the public on Jan. 26.

“In late March, the Lake Monona Ad-hoc Committee will select a preferred master plan to be refined by the chosen design team,” said Mike Sturm, landscape architect with the Madison Parks Department. “The refined plan will be introduced to the Madison Common Council in midAugust with the goal of a final plan by the end of 2023.”

Approvals will be needed from multiple Madison departments, committees and councils, as well as state and federal agencies like the DNR, state Department of Transportation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.