Appleton’s good, bad, and ugly public faces.

Note:  this essay was first published in the Appleton Post-Crescent in December 2008.  It's reproduced here, slightly revised, and with photos added, as the initial post in this Appleton's Public Face blog.

Let’s take a walk down College Avenue, and we’ll see the good, the bad, and the ugly struggling for the heart of our town.

What stately College Avenue usually
doesn't look like ...

... and what it usually does

We’re immediately plunged into a contest between the good and the bad.  Beginning at the College Avenue Bridge, we see extending westward before us what should be one of the most splendid urban boulevards in the country, lined with lovely old houses ranging in a really American mixture from comfortably respectable homes to imposing mansions, many of them architecturally striking, some of them historically significant, and all of them lovingly maintained. 

Lawrence: space and grace

The beauty of this residential district is only enhanced by its contrast to the more formally dignified architecture and landscape of Lawrence University farther on, an area where academic buildings and meticulously kept lawns combine grace and space in a way modern planners seem to have forgotten.

    

Conkey's: At least the building survived

But the tragic word is “should.”  College Avenue itself, instead of fulfilling its destiny as a magnificently welcoming centerpiece to the city’s historic core, has been allowed to become a de facto expressway, which means it is a sort of gash of air and noise pollution splitting the heart of town.  This would be a great street to live on if – I SAID THIS WOULD BE A GREAT STREET TO LIVE ON IF IT WEREN’T FOR ALL THE TRAFFIC NOISE!

The beauty of the past wrestling with
the drabness of the present

Let’s get across Drew Street where at least we can hear ourselves think, partly because a lot of the traffic on the section of College we’ve just walked down has diverted itself onto Meade and Lawe Streets, spoiling much of the otherwise lovely neighborhood east of City Park almost as sadly as it ruins that part of the Avenue itself.   But if as we approach downtown we’ve left much of the bad behind, we now can perceive an even keener struggle between the good and the ugly.  The battle begins at Durkee Street, where two of the prettiest and most historic structures in town, one the previous home of the much-missed Conkey’s Book Store and the other the Harmony Café, flank the Avenue to form a sort of gateway to what’s left of our irreplaceable downtown architectural history.

Harmony Cafe: the interest of the past, slightly 
interrupted by the blandness of the present

The vibrancy of urban environment is
created by a sum of details

Details, shmetails!

203-205 W. College

This gateway leads us to a long tableau of the good, characterful, livable urban landscape of the past wrestling with the faceless and tacky design failures of more recent decades.  The south side of the 100 block of E. College in particular forms an almost unbroken pageant of past glories.   Among the most noted of these is the Wharton-Warner building (still marked with two letter W’s for its builders) at 127-129 E. College, with its gloriously non-functional High Victorian façade.  As we continue our saunter, we pass further riches in more abundance than can be enumerated here, including 203-205 W. College, the original home of the Appleton Post-Crescent newspaper, which explains the symbolism of the two lions’ heads high on the façade, representing crusading journalism’s “roar of truth,” and right next door the wonderful Kamps building, built as a harness shop, hence the wagon-wheel window and finely sculpted horse’s head which has gazed sedately down on The Ave since before 

An unbroken pageant of past glories

most of our grandparents were born.

Beautifully ornamented facade with gargoyle,
wagon wheel window, and horse head reflecting
the building's history

All of College Avenue used to be this beautiful

100 block E. College: will this loveliness too be lost?

Big intersecting planes 
on smaller intersecting planes

But we also find again and again this series of historical gems brutally interrupted by the habitual design disasters of modern times.  It would serve little purpose to name names:   you can see for yourself which buildings on our most important boulevard present us with the mind-numbing tedium of the “intersecting planes” school of architecture (when are architects going to learn that planes are boring even if they intersect?) and the unthinking combination of red brick column and grey concrete wall which makes so many buildings look like parking ramps even if they aren’t.

Grey intersecting planes

Who can imagine what they’ve replaced?  Such structures are monuments to an infatuation with the bulldozer and the wrecking ball.

Colored intersecting planes

Squat intersecting planes

So what’s to do?  We can begin by all opening our eyes to what has been done here to the good of our common heritage because of the encroachment of the bad and the ugly, and by resolving to enter the struggle on the side of the angels.  There’s enough left to be worth working to save.  You could still have a good thing here, Appleton.  Don’t blow it.

Red brick and grey concrete

This is what Galena, Illinois' s downtown looks like.
Huge numbers of people come to see it,
and they spend money.
image information

This is what too much of Appleton's downtown now
 looks like. How far would you travel to see it?