Battle For Madison

Three simple words — “Save the Madison” — have been uttered online and off in the past few weeks, but they might as well be replaced by three more:

“Sell our souls.”

That’s what is at stake if the owners of the Madison Theater raze it to make way for a restaurant. And that’s what they’ve told the group who started the “Battle for the Madison” Facebook page.

The Madison is more than a building; hell, it’s more than most buildings in Peoria. Without going into the long and storied history of the structure, let me tell you what the Madison means to my generation.

It means many of our first concerts. It represents a point in time when a generation of Peoria musicians grew up with one goal in mind: playing the Madison. As rundown as it was then — a single light bulb hanging from the peeling ceiling, smoke hanging thickly in the air, the smell of sweat and stale beer sticking to the floor — it was ours. For many of Peoria’s youth of the ’90s and early 2000s, the Madison represented something we knew well: the feeling of being forgotten, ignored, even disliked.

At some point during this time, the owners made the decision to stop making repairs and bringing in acts. Now, it appears, another of Peoria’s forgotten landmarks will suffer a fate similar to the famed CBGB New York City night club, and it will be no less unceremonious.

The people behind the “Battle for the Madison” Facebook group, which accumulated more than 1,000 “likes” in a single week, are at fault for giving up too quickly. But their crime is a misdemeanor compared to the felony of neglect perpetrated by not only the owners of the building but by Peoria’s politicians, who sat by not far from the Madison and watched it deteriorate.

Year after year, winter after winter, storm after storm, the Madison crumbled inside and out. The only work I can remember being done there in the past decade was to take down the burgundy-turned-faded-pink awnings on the exterior of the building and discard them. Jim Comfort told the Journal Star last May that it would cost $18 million to refurbish the Madison. Those costs come after nearly a decade of vacancy. How much preventative maintenance was done to the structure?

It is their negligence, and the apathy of the majority of Peorians, that doomed the Madison. And it’s their disregard for history that will eventually turn Peoria into one endless, chain store-filled boulevard.

Say what you will about the Madison, but you can’t deny this: It had soul.

Justin Glawe is a Peoria native and former Journal Star intern, now reporting for the Bemidiji Pioneer in Minnesota.