Advertisement What sort of insights had our Oshkosh guests uncovered that our eyes had missed? What fantastic opportunity or profit-bearing niche had been blindly left unfulfilled?
Apparently none, as it turns out.
Eight residents of our exchange city spent time in our own, and eight people left with the impressions we’re in a beautiful river town with a bustling downtown, striking topography and generally high quality of life.
“Coming into the city from the east, the topography is beautiful and interesting ...,” a visitor said. “Downtown appears to be busy and quite nice.”
Said another, “There is a sense of importance that this is a regional center with major hospitals, a brewery, industrial buildings and a vibrant city center.”
It’s a pity. I’d hoped they’d be harsher, to mitigate the jabs in my review of their hometown.
Though unrevealing, they managed to call us out on some of our unsavory traits, the things you can’t stuff in a closet when guests stop by.
“I was continually amazed by the extreme negativity of the comments on the (Tribune) Web site,” one visitor said. “After reading it for a few days, I was surprised to see anyone living in the city. The comments gave me the impression that it was a very ‘backward’ community.”
While they appreciated the variety of older homes, from sprawling Victorian mansions to quaint bungalows, they didn’t miss the lack of new construction in the housing stock.
And apologies to my employer’s neighbors to the south, but their product emerged as the villain of the report, allegedly corrupting the beauty of the bluffs and venerable downtown architecture.
Approaching the city from Exit 5 on Hwy. 16 “was breathtaking with the powerful beauty of the bluffs; however, a proliferation of billboards marred the experience,” an Oshkosh traveler said. The constantly running bubblers and seemingly ineffective pedestrian crossing signs also were mentioned more than once.
“Not sure what is up with all the pedestrian crossings, motorists don’t appear too compliant with them,” one guest wrote in the report.
But the People’s Food Co-Op was the greatest draw and star of the review. Visitors said they would travel a distance to patronize the store, which they called an asset to the downtown.
The eight were surprisingly mixed on off-campus housing, almost like they had visited two different cities.
“The portion ... I visited was in an unexpectedly clean condition — no cars on lawns and I think I only saw one couch on a porch,” according to the report.
Others said La Crosse was experiencing the same rental housing perils as most other college towns.
But I consider the crowning jewel of the assessment to be the review of La Crosse’s local government structure. True or not. Fair or not. Informed or not. It’s still interesting.
They found the building itself, an homage to 1970s architecture, to be “fortress-like ... but functional.”
“I was struck by two characteristics of city government,” a visitor wrote. “(1) the absence of a professional city administrator and (2) the large council size and cumbersome committee structure. ... Several senior staff members spoke of the need for an organizational audit of city government and the need for a professional city administrator.”
To view a pdf of the full 32-page First Impressions final report, go to http://lacrosse.uwex.edu/cnred/index.html.
Samantha Marcus can be reached at (608) 791-8220 or smarcus@lacrossetribune.com.
