Yesterday's Weather
By Michael Bridgeman
Note from the author - I usually focus on Madison places that you can still see or could have recently. This month I highlight a small structure that’s been gone for a century.
A little more than 100 years ago, a visitor to the Capitol building could exit the west wing, descend the stairs toward State Street and, before crossing the street, check weather conditions at a kiosk positioned at the western corner of the square. I learned this thanks to a postcard.
Madison’s Weather Bureau kiosk was installed on the west corner of the Capitol Square. The buildings in the background—the Carroll Block at 20 N. Carroll St. and the Vroman Block at 24—still look much as they did when erected in 1900 to designs by Gordon and Paunack. (Image: Postcard, author’s collection) [Click to enlarge]
The “weather kiosk” was the brainchild of Charles F. Marvin of the U. S. Weather Bureau, as it was then known. According to a National Weather Service Heritage web article The Tale of the Weather Bureau Kiosk, “Several dozen kiosks were placed at favorable locations in the central district of larger towns and cities that had Weather Bureau offices. Staff members of the offices would update the maps and forecasts at the kiosk daily.”
Madison got its kiosk in 1912. George B. Post & Sons, architects of the new Capitol then under construction, were unenthusiastic. “The kiosk is a far from beautiful object,” the architects asserted when urging that it at least be moved to the east corner of the capitol park and even then arguing that, “it should be redesigned and executed in marble or granite.” Post did not prevail on location nor design, though Madison’s kiosk was placed on a granite base.
A single design was used for all the kiosks. Each was four feet square and seven feet high and contained weather maps, forecast information, displays of high and low temperatures, current temperature and humidity, and precipitation. (Image: Sheboygan Press, 1911)
However, the kiosks were short lived. Madison’s weather kiosk was deconstructed in 1919 after less than a decade of service. Parts were sold to local business for scrap. Frank Custer noted the razing of the kiosk in his “Looking Backward” column for The Capital Times: “Eric R. Miller, the [Madison] weather forecaster, says the newspaper is a better medium for disseminating information about the weather than the Capitol kiosk.”
This 1923 shows a group gathered at a weather kiosk in an unidentified location. (Image: National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress)
Not mentioned was that the data generated by the kiosks was notoriously unreliable. As National Weather Service Heritage explains: “Being within the center of a city, with abundant buildings and concrete around it, the temperature information was prone to running warmer than the ‘official’ temperature. Compounding the problem, the kiosk was only ventilated from the bottom, so the warm air rising from the ground had no way to escape. There was no good way to redesign it while still protecting the contents from weather and vandals.”
The “Forward” statue on the Capitol Square is a bronze replica. The original was restored and is now safely indoors on the first floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society building. [Click to enlarge]
Today only one kiosk remains in Knoxville, Tennessee, though it hasn’t functioned as a weather station for about a century. In 1996, the west corner of the Capitol Square became the new home of “Forward,” the statue that Jean Pond Miner created for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.