The Warner Park Community Recreation Center, at 1625 Northport Drive, is a 32,000-square-foot structure built in 1999. About 260,000 people use the center a year.
The need for
a center
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Madison’s Northside was gaining a reputation as a troubled area. It was experiencing increases in poverty, drug use and violent crime. To make matters more difficult, residents didn’t have a unified way to respond. A few smaller neighborhood groups worked for change, but they didn’t have the reach to create change across the broader Northside area.
Northside residents and city representatives started meeting in 1991, however, to put together a plan for what they’d like the Northside to be like in 10 years. A key part of the plan was to have enough recreation and meeting space to meet residents’ needs.
Kennedy Heights, a Northside neighborhood, had a community center, but the space wasn’t able to serve people from all Northside neighborhoods.
Planners wanted a community center serving residents not only from different neighborhoods but also from different incomes, ages, races, ethnicities and other backgrounds. The idea was to construct a center that would become, in the planners’ words, a “crossroads for the community.” In addition to providing needed recreational and meeting space, it would help renew a sense of community by becoming a point of pride.
The resulting WPCRC, which opened to Northside residents in 1999, would indeed become a focus of community identity. There was lots of work, however, to get there.
The Northside Planning Council’s role
A big step toward building the WPCRC came with the formation of the Northside Planning Council (NPC) in 1993.
Borrowing its structure from an earlier organization, the Northside Community Council, the NPC was created as an umbrella group for smaller neighborhood associations scattered across the Northside, with representatives from each association sitting on the council. NPC helped form or restart neighborhood associations for residents living in areas lacking them.
The NPC also created the Northside News, first published in 1995, to keep residents informed of WPCRC progress and encourage readers to donate what they could. As it turns out, those donations were vital.
Community fundraising
In October 1996, the residents got some great news. The Madison common council approved $3.65 million in funding to build the WPCRC.
But they were also faced with a huge challenge—to raise an additional $750,000 themselves. In four years, the Northside exceeded that goal, raising $809,000 through donations from residents, groups, and businesses.
By running ads and articles in the Northside News and holding brick sale drives, the NPC encouraged residents to purchase $50 commemorative bricks that became a part of the WPCRC. By spring 1999, more than 800 were sold.
Clubs and organizations also held fundraisers. During the 1997 holiday season, volunteers from the North/Eastside Senior Coalition, for example, baked and sold nearly 5,000 cookies, with proceeds from their sale going to the WPCRC.
Businesses contributed as well. Owners of shops in the Northgate Shopping Center, for instance, donated a percentage of their sales proceeds on designated days.
The fundraising campaign also focused on seeking larger contributions from Madison-area corporations. By summer 1997, about $250,000 had been pledged by more than two dozen corporate donors.
The quest for a pool
The WPCRC opened in 1999 with a full slate of facilities: a gymnasium, a fitness center, and a game room as well as craft rooms, meeting rooms, and community rooms available to residents to rent for special occasions.
But people had also long hoped for a pool. In 1969 the North Side Community Council passed a resolution calling for both a community center and a pool, according to a history of the WPCRC by Circle of Friends of the Warner Park Community Recreation Center (CoF), a nonprofit group that raises funds for the center and has been key in keeping hope for a pool alive.
In late 1980s, it looked like a Northside pool was possible. A study of potential city pool sites narrowed the possibilities to Warner Park and Olin Park on Lake Monona’s southwest side. The city chose the Olin location, despite some residents’ deep conviction that the parkland there remain untouched. The residents pushed back, and no pool was constructed.
In the mid 2000s, things looked brighter. The 2007 city budget included a $5 million earmark for a Warner Park pool. Supporters would need to raise an additional $3.75 million, but the Northside had met and exceeded daunting fundraising goals before. Then the Great Recession of 2008 hit, and the city needed to remove the pool from its budget. (The CoF continued raising funds, however, and by 2017 had raised more than $250,000 for the project.)
Residents continue to hope for a pool. When the city began planning for a WPCRC expansion that could begin this September, an online survey completed by about 250 residents asked, “What [WPCRC] services/activities do you need that are inadequate?” About a quarter of respondents said they’d like an aquatic center or splash pad.
Given the interest, the city was clear in its instructions that any changes made to the WPCRC in the expansion should not make it impossible to add a pool in the future.
A new gym
Construction on the $5.1 million expansion could begin this fall. It will add 12,000 square feet, mostly in the form of a second multipurpose gym.
The existing gym is heavily booked with community volleyball and basketball league practices and tournaments, fitness classes, and open gym time. WPCRC staff members have said that they turn away three to four gym rentals per day due to the time and space shortage.
Instead of having a traditional hardwood floor, the new gym will feature sports flooring, which can help reduce the risk of injury by absorbing impact. Such flooring is able to withstand stress caused by other uses, helping make the second gym a flexible space. The second gym will also enable WPCRC to hold larger weekend volleyball and basketball tournaments.