Gentrification is weird. It makes you miss things you barely knew were there. You regularly pass by the same old auto body shop, the same laundromat, the same feed mill, and then one day it’s just gone. Or it’s been turned into something so foreign that you almost wish it was gone.
I recently rode my bike to the back of Garver Feed Mill, where we used to host parties in high school. I pass two security cameras and a window with the words “The Idea Factory” printed on it. People are here enjoying coffee and Ian’s pizza. It’s not summer yet, but it’s warm enough.
Garver Feed Mill wasn’t always a nice spot to take your family or get some work done. It was once an abandoned building, but one that teemed with life, a playground for those brave enough to enter.
The piles of bricks I remember and the layers of graffiti are scrubbed away. We once raised a flag on that brick pile. It was just a dirty sheet and some random metal pole we found. It didn’t really stand for anything, but that was sort of the point.
I turn around and this is when the tears come. I have to keep biking to not disturb the people working on their laptops. It hasn’t really hit me yet. I mean, I knew it was different. I didn’t know it was gone.
The back lot where there used to be rough hills and brambles and fields and birds and our old fort “Domain 2” and even a pet cat we rescued (she lived there for only a few weeks before she was adopted by a friend) is now perfect, level gravel.
As the old Joni Mitchell song goes, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
It was mostly east-side kids with some Shabazz kids thrown in. Even west-siders would drive over if a gathering was “lit” enough. These were not really parties you would want your kid to go to. It was 2014 and we were mixing Everclear with soda, breaking bottles and burning the couches we had gathered from the curb earlier in the evening.
Inside the building, nature ran its course. There was even a tree growing on the roof. I have no idea how it grew up there on that cement roof. Its roots must have dug into the concrete. Maybe the roots wrapped around the whole building. I saw it every day for years and never thought to photograph it.
For teenagers with not much to lose, it was paradise. A space my friends and I called “The Factory.” You could stay out past curfew. The police that busted the parties probably found the whole scene pretty hellish.
One year I borrowed my Mom’s minivan and we stuffed as many Christmas trees as we could into the back seat. It smelled amazing (I never did get all the pine needles out). That night the fire got so big it went higher than the building itself and we all slipped on the ice running from the police. Someone lost a pair of glasses.
One night, a bunch of thirty-somethings on bikes came through, drinking beer. We were throwing bottles around, making small talk. Someone smashed a bottle on a screaming blue graffitied face on the wall.
“Hey man, watch it, some of us aren’t wearing shoes,” said one of the bicyclists. “This is America and we can be barefoot here if we want.”
I looked around the abandoned lot, broken glass scattered everywhere. I almost thought he was joking.
Well this is America and we can smash bottles at the abandoned factory if we want, I thought. I didn’t say it but a friend did and it killed the vibe. The herd of cyclists biked off into the night.
This was a place away from all adult supervision, for better or worse. It was dangerous, sure; it was almost punk — but no one had a band. Maybe there was a portable speaker playing SoundCloud. All cliques and factions evaporated in the heat of the bonfire.
Inside the factory the floor sagged, rusted metal and graffiti was everywhere. Even now the column next to Ian’s Pizza still has a green faded face a friend of mine from high school stenciled onto the rusty pillar. Was it left purposefully as decoration or was it a hold-out from power washing? Hard to know.
I come out of my nostalgic daze and watch three girls doing TikTok dances in the gravel lot. Time moves forward, I guess.
Madison has changed so much. Some people never knew it was different. I grieve for that abandoned feed mill. Even though it’s hard to defend keeping a rotting building when it could be a place of opportunity for businesses and artists instead of a place for kids to be weird.
I never thought it was going to change. They put up iron supports on the brick walls to keep them from collapsing. The premise of turning that place into something usable seemed insane.
Who knew that the groovy east side was one day going to be littered with home security signs? Who ever thought there would be more than one Willy Street Co-op? Who ever thought there would be traffic? Who knew how many IPAs were yet to be invented?
Would there be any point in keeping the Garver Feed Mill an old rotting building? No, not really. It was dangerous and dirty and could have collapsed at any moment. Still, I guess I thought it might be passed down to the next generation of burnouts. Because there still need to be places to let loose some teenage angst. n
Jack Ludkey was born and raised in Madison. He is currently writing and residing in Brooklyn, New York.
