Fall 2004 issue of On Wisconsin magazine.
The article is 8 pages long and written by John Allen entitled: Madison's Magnum Opus. I am on the last page with the headline: The Entrepreneur.
On the corner of State and Fairchild stands a tiny shop (advertised as State Street's smallest) with a sign on the wall, almost hidden by a blue awning: "Welcome," it says above a silhouette of the isthmus skyline, "Madison's Museum MileTM".
On first glance, it appears to refer to the vast Overture Center (State Street's largest structural resident), which rises just across Fairchild. But the sign is too old. It is, rather, evidence that the vision of a downtown thriving on cultural experience isn't confined to Jerry Frautschi.
The shop, called Game Haven, is the property of Dennis De Nure. Like Frautschi, De Nure traces his family's Madison connection back more than a century. De Nure, too, is an entrepreneur; though his ventures aren't on Webcrafters' scale--he's sold T-shirts on State and at the World Dairy Expo, and at Game Haven he now sells trading cards and role-playing games. And like Frautschi, a percentage of his personal fortune has come from dolls--not American Girls, but Beanie Babies.
De Nure first conceived of the Museum Mile in 1984, around the same time that Jerry and Pleasant Frautschi were sponsoring the first Concerts on the Square. "It just seemed obvious, really," he says. "The consciousness of Madison, of its non-ordinary reality, is culture. I figured if we could surround {Capitol} Square with first-class museums, we'd create educational and heritage tourism."
At the time, he was running a shop called De Nure's T-shirt Factory and Sixties Museum. Then, the cultural geography of the State Street corridor was just beginning to take shape. The Madison Civic Center, with its Museum of Contemporary Art, was just four years old, and the Wisconsin Historical Museum, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, and Madison Children's Museum did not yet have locations on State and the Square. Still, De Nure saw the potential in creating a cultural district.
"Look at junk food places," he says. "Do they market themselves by going out on their own? No, they locate themselves right next to other junk food places. The same thing can work for family-oriented entertainment. By surrounding an area with museums, we'd enhance the visibility and viability of each individual museum as well as the area as a whole."
The concept might increase traffic to De Nure's store--and offer more direct rewards as well. "I have to admit, there was a bet of self-interest involved," he says. "I've always been a creative person, especially with trademarks. So I came up with the line, Madison's Museum Mile and trademarked it." De Nure hoped that, once he convinced the city of the merits of his plan, it would buy the rights to the slogan from him.
But Madison was not then of a mind to create cultural corridors.
"Madison used to have the reputation of a city that couldn't put two bricks together," says Bob D'Angelo, who directed the Civic Center from 1990 to its end and would have retired if it hadn't been for Overture and the chance to run the Madison Cultural Arts District. "But that perception began to change with the introduction of private money, and with people like Jerry Frautschi."
While Frautschi saw the realization of one piece of his downtown vision after another--the concerts, the Monona terrace, Overture--De Nure kept his idea of the Museum Mile alive. Though the T-shirt Factory went under in 1987, he ran for mayor, promoting the Museum Mile from the campaign stump.
He lost and returned to State Street in 1993 with the opening of Game Haven. Though the property is small, the shop has hosted several more cultural concepts: the National Onion Museum, the Pokemon Museum, the Beanie Baby Museum, and, most recently, the Dolliseum. "That was my worst idea," admits De Nure. "I lost more than $100,000 on that one."
But he refuses to give up, as the Museum Mile sign attests. And if his idea has been overshadowed (as thoroughly as his store is literally, in late afternoons) by Overture, he still believes that creating a cultural district is the key to downtown's economic future. He's even postponed Game Haven's tenth anniversary celebration by a year to coincide with the opening of Overture.
"This is a great idea," he says, "no matter who makes money off of it."