Did You Know Madison Has a ‘Lost City’?

Madison is a city full of real estate gems — of both the commercial and residential varieties. But it’s also a city with its share of failed real estate experiments. Hidden in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum are the remains of one of the most famous of those experiments — the Lake Forest development, Madison’s “Lost City.”

Lake Forest was dreamed up in the 1910s and early 1920s as a peaceful respite from the chaos of city life. Nolan Ferlic of the Badger Herald writes that the plan was to use 840 acres to build 7,000 “dwelling units,” parks, schools, public transit and a city center. A periodical, The Lake Forester, was published during 1920 and 1921 to promote the development; copies are in the UW-Madison’s digital library and can be viewed here.

Lake Forest, though, was only barely started before everything went wrong. Chris Malina of Wisconsin Public Radio interviews Kathy Miner, a guide and naturalist at the Arboretum, who explains land, people and politics all led to the downfall of the development.

The land for Lake Forest was swampland, Miner says, and the developers “didn’t use enough fill, and roads literally sank and became covered with water.”

Meanwhile, Malina says, “the operator of the bond company that underwrote the Lake Forest Land Co. before and after his time in Madison, was involved in real-estate fraud, and ultimately, caused the company to go under. … The third piece of the puzzle was World War I, which was taking place at the time and drastically affected the national economy.”

Only a few homes (five or seven, depending on the source) were ever built and no one ever lived in them. By 1922, the dream of Lake Forest was dead. Today, the remains of the development are barely visible in the woods of the Arboretum. The site is off-limits to visitors of the Arboretum, but once a year, off-trail tours are given of the Lost City.

For more information, plus photos and development plans, go here.