Madison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of Wisconsin, a state of the United States of America. As of the 2000 census, it has a population of 208,054. It is the county seat of Dane County. The city completely surrounds the smaller Town of Madison.
The University of Wisconsin's main campus is located in the city. The main downtown thoroughfare is State Street, which links the University campus with the State Capitol square, and is lined with restaurants, espresso cafes, and shops. Only pedestrians, buses, police and bikes are allowed on State Street. The Capitol Square is situated on the isthmus between lakes Mendota and Monona. A current development in Madison is the development of King Street along the lines that State Street has developed. If one were to draw a straight line down State Street, it would bisect the Capitol Square and continue down King Street. King Street attracts a more yuppie crowd or, as Madison residents jokingly say, the "post-graduate" crowd, referring to the growing young white-collar high-tech population in Madison. Due to this, King Street has more upper-end restaurants and cafes than one would find on the more student-budget State Street.
Madison is considered the healthiest city in America by Mens Health magazine. Many major streets in Madison have designated bike lanes and the city has one of the most extensive bike trail systems in the nation. Due to this, Madison has a very active cyclist culture and it is common place to see groups of friends bicycling together throughout the city on nice days.
Notable buildings include the Wisconsin State Capitol, and the Monona Terrace meeting and convention center, based on a design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, who spent a brief time as a student at the University, also designed other buildings in Madison, such as the Unitarian meeting house. In the summer time, on Saturday mornings, the Dane County Farmers' Market--the largest farmers' market in the nation--is held around the Capitol Square. On Wednesday evenings on the same square in Summer, the Madison Symphony gives free concerts to people picnicking on the Capitol's lawn.
Madison will always be associated with the name of "Fighting Bob" LaFollette and the Progressive movement. La Follette's magazine, The Progressive, founded in 1909, is still published in Madison today. Due to this, the city being a long-time stronghold of the Democratic Party at the national level, and having a typically liberal and progressive majority city council, residents and outsiders (Rush Limbaugh for one) have jokingly referred to the city as "The People's Republic of Madison." A more common slur attached to the city by its political detractors is that Madison is a city of "(fill in the blank) square miles surrounded by reality," a number which grows due to the city's regular annexation of surrounding lands. This phrase was originally coined by former Wisconsin governor Lee Sherman Dreyfuss, a Republican, and has been adapted into a label attached to various cities across the U.S.
Madison's economy today is evolving from a manufacutring base to a services and high-tech base, particularly in the health and biotech fields, though the Wisconsin state government and University of Wisconsin remain major employers. Since the beginning of the 1990's, the city has been in an economic boom that has yet to stop and has been comparatively unaffected by any recessions the rest of the nation has experienced during this time period. Much of the building expansion has occurred on the city's southern and western rim. Reasons for the boom is the development of high-tech companies and many of these have been actively fostered by University of Wisconsin - Madison (http://www.wisc.edu/). UW working with local businesses and entrepreneurs to take the results of its research (most notably bio-tech research) and finding real-world applications of it for the marketplace. Still other businesses move to or start up in Madison simply to take advantage of the highest level of education of residents in the nation. As of 2004 as reported by Forbes Magazine, Madison has the highest percentage of Ph.D.s in the nation per 1,000 residents.
Madison is home to a plethora of print publications for a city its size. Two daily newspapers, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Capital Times, are published there. Though conjoined in a joint-operating agreement named Capital Newspapers, the former is owned by the national chain Lee Enterprises (http://www.lee.net), while the latter is independently-owned. The city is also home to the free weekly alternative newspaper, Isthmus, and more recently coreweekly, a weekly tabloid intiated by Lee to compete with Isthmus for the city's classifieds market, and to build a younger readership demographic for their papers. The Onion satirical weekly was also founded in Madison, though its editorial headquarters were moved to New York City in 2000. It is also home to two weekday student newspapers, The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald, as well as numerous other specialty publications focusing on local music, politics, and sports.
In Madison during the sixties, thousands of students and other citizens took part in antiwar marches and demonstrations. These protests were the subject of the documentary The War at Home (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=52754). The counterculture was centered in the neighborhood of Mifflin and Bassett streets, referred to as Mifflin-Bassett or Miffland. The area contained many three-story apartments where students and counterculture youth lived, painted murals, opened vegetarian restaurants and co-operative grocery stores, and used illegal substances. The neighborhood often came into conflict with authorities, particularly then-Mayor Bill Dyke (who was later to run for vice-president with segregationist Lester Maddox). Tom Bates writes in Rads that Dyke's attempt to suppress the annual Mifflin Street block party "would take three days, require hundreds of officers on overtime pay, and engulf the student community from the Southeast Dorms to fraternity row. Tear gas hung like heavy fog across the isthmus." In the fracas, student activist Paul Soglin, then an alderman, was arrested and taken to jail. Later, Soglin was to become mayor of Madison, serving from 1973 to 1979 and from 1989 to 1997.
Today, Madison's student population has gained the reputation as the party campus of the Big Ten universities. Examples of this include the still-continuing annual Mifflin Street Block Party (originally a 1960s counterculture event, today it's a beginning of summer party for students) and the State Street Halloween Party. Both of these parties are commonly attended by tens of thousands of partiers, which include an ever-growing number of persons who come from out of state just to attend these parties. Following a riot that developed at the 1996 Mifflin Street Block Party, it was forcibly cancelled by the city one year; this disturbance wasn't political in nature. Since then, the Mifflin Street Party has been allowed by the city to start up again and has taken a more mellow tone. Meanwhile, the State Street Halloween Party has been showing similar problems. In 2004, over 400 partiers were arrested after bonfires were started on the street during the celebration. Of the 400, over half of the arrestees were not even Wisconsin residents or UW-Madison students. It was the third subsequent year that riots developed at the Halloween festivities. It is for these reasons and others why another of the city's nicknames is "Mad City".
In 1996 Money magazine identified Madison as the best place to live in the United States. It has consistently ranked near the top of the best-places list in subsequent years (the list is published annually by the magazine), with the city's consistently low unemployment rate being a major factor in its ranking.
Notable people associated with Madison include Thornton Wilder, Eric Heiden, Tyne Daly and Chris Farley all born in Madison; Charles A. Lindbergh, who entered a mechanical engineering program at the University of Wisconsin in 1920, did poorly, and dropped out to become a barnstormer; and musicians Steve Miller (who attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Otis Redding (who died in a 1967 plane crash in Madison).
Geography
Demographics
As of the census2 of 2000, there are 208,054 people, 89,019 households, and 42,462 families residing in the city. The population density is 1,169.8/km² (3,029.7/mi²). There are 92,394 housing units at an average density of 519.5/km² (1,345.4/mi²). The racial makeup of the city is 83.96% White, 5.84% African American (most of whom reside in such neighborhoods as Allied Drive, Broadway-Lake Point, and Worthington Park), 0.36% Native American, 5.80% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 1.67% from other races, and 2.32% from two or more races. 4.09% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There are 89,019 households out of which 22.1% have children under the age of 18 living with them, 37.0% are married couples living together, 7.8% have a female householder with no husband present, and 52.3% are non-families. 35.3% of all households are made up of individuals and 7.1% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age or older. The average household size is 2.19 and the average family size is 2.87.
In the city the population is spread out with 17.9% under the age of 18, 21.4% from 18 to 24, 32.2% from 25 to 44, 19.3% from 45 to 64, and 9.2% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 31 years. For every 100 females there are 96.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 95.0 males.
The median income for a household in the city is $41,941, and the median income for a family is $59,840. Males have a median income of $36,718 versus $30,551 for females. The per capita income for the city is $23,498. 15.0% of the population and 5.8% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total population, 11.4% of those under the age of 18 and 4.5% of those 65 and older are living below the poverty line.
External links
- Forbes Magazine's "Miracle in the Midwest" (http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2004/0524/120.html) article. It was this issue that ranked Madison as the Number #1 City in the nation in 2004 and also explains its bio-tech boom.
- The city of Madison, Wisconsin online: http://ci.madison.wi.us
- Madison Index: http://www.december.com/places/mad/
- Capital Newspapers site: http://www.madison.com
- CNN/Money statistics: http://money.cnn.com/best/bplive/details/5548000.html
- Isthmus Weekly site: http://www.thedailypage.com
- The Onion: http://www.theonion.com
- The Daily Cardinal: http://www.dailycardinal.com
- The Badger Herald: http://www.badgerherald.com
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