The morning sun shines between the narrow gaps in the worn brick buildings as I ride my 10-speed from my home in Madison’s Vilas neighborhood to the University of Wisconsin campus. Looking around I can see a lively neighborhood defined by walking and biking. The homes on either side of me are tightly packed and worn down by the years of college students and blue-collar workers alike living their lives behind the doors. It’s clear that I am in an area old enough to pre date the automobile, a time when children played in the streets and families walked to the grocery store. However, as I enter the Greenbush neighborhood and approach the main intersection, Park Street and Regent Street, I am not met with corner stores and bars that I would expect from a typical streetcar suburb. Instead I find that I have been transported to a newer suburban landscape; the roads are wide, the quaint brick buildings and wooden houses are missing, and wide parking lots have taken their place. In fact, I cannot even see where a person would enter the large, industrial looking buildings. I could just as easily be in Fitchburg, a southern suburb of Madison. It’s very clear that these particular couple blocks of city do not belong in the urban landscape of central Madison. What happened to this intersection to make it feel so out of place?
The Greenbush neighborhood is a prime example of why the urban renewal principles of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t work. Greenbush was historically a neighborhood that was home to low-income, marginalized people groups in Madison, who had nowhere else to go. When national and city agencies came in to intervene, the community of the neighborhood was torn apart, leaving only a husk. The story of Greenbush is not an uncommon scenario in the United States. Looking at the stories of people in the neighborhood will show us how much the urban “development” projects of the 60s can hurt a vibrant and healthy community.
If we stand at the intersection today, looking south, we can see large medical buildings on either side of the street, surrounded with parking lots. These are the Meriter Hospital, constructed in the late 1960s and the UW-Clinic built in the 1990s. Looking to the north, we see a brutalist brick building and a newly developed high-rise apartment building. One would have to look very closely to notice the vestiges of the old Greenbush neighborhood. In fact, only a couple buildings show the neighborhood for what it once was. One is a tiny yellow storefront with a painted sign reading “Shoe Repair.” The shop is barely clinging onto the small square footage of ground that it occupies, tucked under a billboard, and pushed right up against an industrial driveway. The other is an unassuming building layered with brick and stone. It’s hard to see from its one story build, but without this building, the “Italian Workmen’s Club”, Greenbush would not likely exist.
The influx of Italian immigrants to Madison in the early 20th century was driven by tremendous poverty in their homeland, Sicily, the poorest region of Italy. Workers came to Madison looking for any scrap of work they could find to keep their families back across the ocean alive, working twelve-hour days to earn only five dollars1. The only land they could find to live on was the swamp on the south side of the city. These workers were looked down on by the early Northern-European settlers, so they formed the club as a way of banding together. Originally in a shack a couple houses down, the club became the center point for their newly developing neighborhood, and was eventually moved to its current site in 19142. From then on, Greenbush grew into a thriving neighborhood and community.
In the early 1950s the intersection of Park and Regent was the economic and social crux for people in the Greenbush neighborhood. Since larger roadways have more traffic and are more desirable for storefronts, the intersections of major avenues create community business districts. These community business districts are crucial for the livelihood of a neighborhood, especially for lower income ones since they have generally have more affordable prices for necessary goods3. If we were to stand in the exact same spot 61 years earlier, in 1955, we would be witnessing a very different scene. On the southwest side of the intersection stood a series of tightly packed brick storefronts, with small apartments sitting on the second and third floors1. On the corner was “Tiny’s Café”, a restaurant owned by Nicolo Quartuccio, an Italian Immigrant5. Next door was a small grocery store, called “J&A Grocery.” Another Italian, Joe Aiello, owned this6. On the other side of J&A was a steak house and tiki bar7 followed by a drive through paint shop8. This was just one quadrant of the intersection. Every other corner was layered with a multitude of family owned businesses. The Greenbush neighborhood was a thriving neighborhood, where people had a sense of community and ownership. The intersection of Park and Regent was a place where people from the whole neighborhood came together to eat, drink, shop, and go about their daily activities.
In the early 1950s the intersection of Park and Regent was the economic and social crux for people in the Greenbush neighborhood. Since larger roadways have more traffic and are more desirable for storefronts, the intersections of major avenues create community business districts. These community business districts are crucial for the livelihood of a neighborhood, especially for lower income ones since they have generally have more affordable prices for necessary goods3. If we were to stand in the exact same spot 61 years earlier, in 1955, we would be witnessing a very different scene. On the southwest side of the intersection stood a series of tightly packed brick storefronts, with small apartments sitting on the second and third floors4. On the corner was “Tiny’s Café”, a restaurant owned by Nicolo Quartuccio, an Italian Immigrant5. Next door was a small grocery store, called “J&A Grocery.” Another Italian, Joe Aiello, owned this6. On the other side of J&A was a steak house and tiki bar7 followed by a drive through paint shop8. This was just one quadrant of the intersection. Every other corner was layered with a multitude of family owned businesses. The Greenbush neighborhood was a thriving neighborhood, where people had a sense of community and ownership. The intersection of Park and Regent was a place where people from the whole neighborhood came together to eat, drink, shop, and go about their daily activities.
However, there was a factor that was working against the neighborhood: discrimination. Because the population was primarily composed of Italian immigrants, African Americans, and Jewish people, it was a target for hate. Greenbush was often referred to as the “Greenbush Slum.”9 Those who lived in Greenbush were people who often couldn’t afford to live in other parts of the city. Like any other city in the United States, Madison had large-scale forces working against these low income and minority residents. The banks in the area deemed the Greenbush neighborhood “Hazardous” and “Definitely Declining” and refused to lend money to residents to purchase homes there10. As a result of this, the neighborhood was vulnerable to vacancy; apartments often stood empty11. Lawrence Veiller, chairman of the National Housing Association called the neighborhood a “civic cancer.”12 Greenbush was looked down on by most of the city, because its people were low-income and minorities, and was written off an undesirable place to live.
According to the people who actually lived in the neighborhood, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Residents in 1961 referred to their home was a “good home you will cherish forever”, and said that the area was a great place to raise their children13. George Fabian, who was born in Greenbush in 1931 and lived there most of his life says that, “in [his] experience there was nothing bad about the neighborhood… the most honest people [he] ever knew were from the neighborhood.” Countless other inhabitants describe the neighborhood as an excellent community; doors were left unlocked because people trusted each other14. Joe Cerniglia, another resident born in 1935, sums up the neighborhood beautifully. “[E]verybody was poor and in the same boat, and other parts of the city were prejudiced against the neighborhood, so we all stuck together.”15 Unlike the slums of neighboring cities, Milwaukee and Chicago, the rate of violent crime remained very low16. The population of the neighborhood started as low-wage workers, but by banding together as a community they were able to have “their descendants [become] successful businessmen and civic leaders.”17 Greenbush was all some people had. In a country that marginalized them for race, religion and socio-economic status, people had a community they could rely on.
To city planners of the time, neighborhoods like these were seen as “eye-sores”, and were targeted as places that must be “cleaned up”. They did this all over the country by gutting and demolishing vibrant communities and developing out-of-place, large-scale housing projects and commercial developments, “that become [even] worse centers of delinquency.”18 Madison was no exception to this school of thought. In June 1967, a 6.25 acre plan was drawn up to demolish everything from Greenbush to West Washington Avenue and build a commercial shopping center and high rise apartment buildings, in a development called the “Triangle Renewal Project.”19 Fran Remeika, an activist in Greenbush at the time recalls her efforts to prevent the damage to the neighborhood thorough and anti-renewal referendum. Her referendum failed by razor thin margins.20 The plan was granted government funding by July.21 In order to get support from the citizens living in Madison, the Madison Redevelopment Authority (MRA) showed residents beautiful drawings22 of an idealized, unreachable plan including community assets and framed the project as something that would help the low-income residents of the area. This gained the momentum that the MRA needed to begin. Several months later, destruction began.
The homes of Greenbush were swept right out from under citizens. An average of $6,500 was paid for each property23, leaving many unable to find another place in the city to live. The MRA claimed that they would be able to find housing for the displaced residents, but this was largely unsuccessful. Nicolo Quartuccio and his wife had owned his restaurant at the corner of Park and Regent for 33 years, living down the street24. Their entire livelihood existed within the bounds of the Triangle Renewal Area. The MRA was assigned the task of finding them a new site for the restaurant, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Nicolo’s only request was that they could find a location near the original site25, hoping he could sustain the community that he had before. No new location was found, and the restaurant was never able to reopen26. Remeika called out the fact that those at the MRA “weren’t making any efforts to relocate people; they weren’t concerned about them.”27 Most resident in the entire 6.25 acres were discarded just like Nicolo.
Only after the bulldozers and wrecking-balls had leveled the neighborhood did the MRA reveal that there was no funding for the civic amenities promised and that there were no commercial vendors who were willing to invest in the project.28 Residents were devastated. Remeika referred to the project as a “dirty trick.”29 The only part of the plan that made it to construction was a low-income housing development30, a place ridden with crime where residents had no autonomy to live the lifestyle they wanted. The rest of the area sat vacant for decades; what was once the core of a vibrant neighborhood was now a vacant lot.
Often neighborhoods populated by low-income and minority residents are written off as crime-filled eyesores, but this story shows us how important they can be. The Triangle Renewal Project proved to be a turning point in urban politics. It exposed the urban renewal projects of the mid 20th century for what they really were: pure discrimination and destruction. In 2013, Former Madison mayor Paul Solglin described the project as “one of many unsuccessful urban renewal projects of its era.”31 The director of the MRA leading the project, Sol Levin, finally realized the true atrocity he committed. In 1991 he set up the “Madison Area Community Land Trust”, an organization that connects low-income families with affordable homes32. Eventually two hospitals filled in the vacancy, but the neighborhood was never the same. Many residents of Greenbush were forced out to the suburbs of Madison, living in housing projects around the area33. Like a forest, a neighborhood will always regrow, but never the same as it used to. The Elimination of the Greenbush community hurt the city of Madison, just like urban renewal projects hurt cities all across the country. The story of Greenbush helps us to realize that you cannot judge a neighborhood purely on its appearance.