Traveling War Memorial Draws 340 Visitors, Dozens Lost En Route On Downtown One-Ways
The nationally traveling memorial display at Schuetze Recreation Center drew hundreds of visitors this week, many of whom struggled with Waukesha's confusing downtown street grid.
WAUKESHA — The Iraq-Afghanistan Memorial: Remembering Our Fallen, a nationally traveling display honoring service members killed since 2001, completed its four-day stop at Schuetze Recreation Center on Sunday having drawn 340 visitors, according to city parks department figures. An unofficial and less flattering count, kept informally by parking attendants near the venue, put the number of visitors who initially approached from the wrong direction at "most of them."
The memorial arrived Wednesday and was set up without incident on the recreation center's east lawn. The trouble, staff said, began the moment visitors tried to get there from downtown, where Waukesha's one-way grid does not so much guide drivers to their destination as offer opinions about it.
The city parks department logged 12 phone calls over the four days from visitors requesting directions, a volume one staffer described as "about what we'd expect for something one exit off the highway that isn't." Several callers reported passing the recreation center's street multiple times without finding a way to turn onto it.
Circling The Block, Repeatedly
Margaret Hoelz, 62, of Oconomowoc, drove to Waukesha specifically to see the memorial, which lists a cousin of hers among the names. She circled the downtown area three times, by her own count, before locating the correct approach to Schuetze Recreation Center.
"I had the address typed into my phone the entire time," Hoelz said. "The phone kept telling me to turn. The street kept telling me no."
"A maze designed by someone who doesn't believe in North."
— Anonymous caller to the Waukesha parks department
One of the 12 callers to the parks department, who did not give a name, offered the above assessment of the downtown grid to the staffer who fielded the call. The staffer said the description "was not inaccurate" and has since been repeated around the office at least four times.
Parking attendants stationed near the recreation center said several visitors, after multiple failed approaches, abandoned the drive altogether. At least two vehicles were seen pulled over on Broadway with occupants examining the memorial's location on a phone rather than continuing toward it. One attendant said a visitor asked whether it would be easier to view the memorial "from satellite photos instead" and appeared to be only partially joking.
A Familiar Complaint
The grid's reputation precedes it. Broadway, St. Paul Avenue, and several connecting downtown blocks flip direction from one segment to the next, a layout longtime residents navigate mostly through memorization rather than logic. Visitors relying on GPS are frequently routed onto a one-way street heading the wrong way, at which point the software recalculates a new route that is often no better than the first.
Bob Krueger, 72, retired city Department of Public Works supervisor and occasional opinion contributor to this paper, said he was not surprised by the memorial visitors' trouble. "That grid has been confusing people since before I had the job of not fixing it," Krueger said. "It's not a bug. Well, it is a bug. But it's our bug."
Parks department staff said no visitors missed the memorial entirely, though several arrived considerably later than planned. One family from Waukesha's south side, headed by Cody England, said what should have been an eight-minute drive took 26 minutes and included an unplanned pass through the Sunset Drive roundabout. "We saw the memorial sign twice before we ever got near it," England said. "Once going the wrong way past it, once going the wrong way past it again."
What Happens Next
The memorial departed Sunday evening for its next stop, reported by organizers to be a community in Illinois with, per its promotional materials, "conventional streets." The parks department said it has no plans to add temporary directional signage for future traveling exhibits, citing budget constraints and, according to one staffer, "a sense that it wouldn't fully solve the problem."
Asked whether the department had considered simply routing future visitors around downtown entirely, the staffer said that was already the informal advice given to all 12 callers, and that most had ignored it and driven through downtown anyway.