Rhythm & Booms...& Bust?

Rhythm & Booms is up in the air again, with financial pressures likely scaling back this year's show to fireworks only, and environmental activists pressuring the city to cancel the event altogether. Thursday before last, Alds. Weier and Rhodes-Conway held a packed meeting at Warner Park that emphasized the lack of unanimity in our neighborhood over the future of this event.

I was unable to attend the meeting, but here's what I'd have said had I been able to be there:

Ending Rhythm & Booms at Warner Park basically means canceling it for good, which would be a serious blow to the community as a whole. There is simply no other event that brings together all of Madison the way Rhythm & Booms does, and the lack of attention this aspect of the discussion has received illustrates the great divide below our Portlandesque public image.

There are really two Madisons: the affluent, white, politically active and liberal community on which the "72 square miles surrounded by reality" stereotype is based; and the poorer, black and Latino and Asian and working-class white community that too often gets overlooked. Sometimes the divide becomes visible -- the recent Madison Prep controversy springs to mind -- but we're usually pretty successful at papering it over.

The former Madison would point out that we have plenty of community events: the Farmers' Market, Concerts on the Square, Taste of Madison, Willy Street Fair, the shows on Overture's calendar, and any number of Badger game days. But how many folks from the latter Madison do you see at these? Can anyone claim with a straight face that these events bring together anything resembling the diverse cross-section that comes to Warner Park every July?

As for environmental concerns about the fireworks' residue, the position of those pushing an end to the event seems to be that anything short of a pristine nature preserve is unacceptable. Any park built around recreation rather than conservation is going to have an environmental impact. Whether the presence of trace fireworks residue in the lagoon is an unacceptable addition to all the other human activity in the area is a valid question (which the study going on will inform) but it cannot be answered by excluding the broader context of Warner Park in our community.

Madison has so few large community spaces as it is. By virtue of geography and chance, the Northside happens to have the biggest. As a Northside resident, I don't think one big event per year to celebrate our nation's independence with fireworks and entertainment is an unreasonable imposition on the neighborhood. We can and should continue tweaking the event to make it as safe as possible, but getting rid of Rhythm & Booms altogether would be a real loss for the community.