The New Lake Park Hotel -- A Proposal for Downtown Renovation

As noted below, the Madville Times is always thinking about downtown development. We love our downtown, but even we will acknowledge that Madison's Egan Avenue could be jazzed up a little bit. A literal step in that direction would be the creation of some main-street greenspace where musicians could play, like "Nick's Park," a little picnic nook next to famed Nick's Hamburgers in downtown Brookings that hosts live "Music on Main" every Thursday evening through this summer. (While you're at it, check out DowntownBrookings.com's entire site for a good look at grassroots downtown development!)

Lake Park Hotel, Madison, SD, long ago.
Postcard image from USGenWeb Archives.

But for a bigger leap toward downtown development, how about resurrecting the Lake Park Hotel? No, no, no, not the motel on West Highway 34, but this grand stone edifice that once graced downtown Madison. If memory serves me right, the original Lake Park (which was also called the General Beadle -- an impressive and historic moniker! -- and the Park), stood on the corner of Egan and SW 2nd Street. Currently, a laundromat and Lakebrook Appliance stand in its place. Also on that block are the old Job Service building, the Jensen building that Rosebud is using for storage, and the vacant Happy Hour bar, object of Rosebud's thwarted desires for expansion.

If the city doesn't want Rosebud or other manufacturing taking up valuable main street storefronts, it needs to find something better to put in those empty spaces. We thus propose buying up as much of the block as we can get and rebuilding the Lake Park/General Beadle Hotel as a glorious downtown convention center. The location is ideal, within four blocks of restaurants, bars, City Hall, the county courthouse, all of Madison's best retail, real estate and law offices, the post office, the library and Library Park, and even the grocery store. The site is right across the street from the historic depot, which houses the Chamber of Commerce and Lake Area Improvement Corporation -- perfect location for meetings with all those jetset businessmen who will come to talk business and want swanky downtown accommodations to which to retire after a hard day of negotiations. There'd even be lots of room for parking (which everyone tells me is essential for any successful business) and expansion on that block and maybe even across Egan beside the Leader Publishing building and the old dairy loading docks.

A great downtown hotel and convention center could become an anchor of daytime business and evening entertainment in our fair city, helping energize and identify our downtown the way the Calumet Inn does in Pipestone, or the historic Franklin Hotel in Deadwood. The Madville Times capital investment fund is currently tied up in gallery and environmental projects, but the moment our sixth or seventh million comes in, we'll invest in bringing the Lake Park back into business downtown.