The steam whistle’s mournful sound announces the end of the day or the arrival of dangerous weather. Jeff Miller

As UW traditions go, this one really blows.

Anyone who has spent an evening on the Terrace will remember the loud, mournful sound of the steam whistle, announcing the end of the day or the arrival of dangerous weather. The whistle has been singing its sad song above the Terrace since 1987, though it’s actually decades older.

The whistle is attached to the Lake Safety Tower (or “sail tower”), a gift to the university from the Class of ’32. That tower is located on the northeast corner of Helen C. White Hall, so it’s not actually part of Memorial Union. Powered by steam from the university’s heating system, the whistle is operated by the UW Police Department’s Lake Rescue and Safety (LRAS) unit. On a day with calm weather, an automatic timer sounds Ol’ Steamy for seven to 10 seconds exactly an hour before the lifesaving station wraps up its workday, as a signal calling all those who have rented boats from Hoofers to return to shore.

“They need to be back 15 minutes before we close,” says Sean Geib ’97 of the UW’s Lifesaving Station.

When the National Weather Service sends a warning to say that severe weather is imminent — or when there’s lightning over Lake Mendota — a member of LRAS sounds the whistle manually in three short blasts. This is meant to give a more urgent signal to get off the water.

The sail tower is not the steam whistle’s original location. It used to be on the Old Boat House, which stood where the Martin and Florence Below Alumni Center is today. And it wasn’t only used for lake safety. In the 1940s and 1950s, one of its chief functions was to announce curfew to the UW’s female students, ordering them to return to their residence halls. To them, presumably, the whistle’s note sounded even sadder.

The sunburst design — perhaps Madison’s most recognizable symbol — sparks fond memories of times spent hanging out with friends and gazing at Lake Mendota’s many moods.

Following the Union’s years of renovation, staff and student leaders decided to start a new tradition. Since 2016, they’ve invited eager students and community members to join the fun of opening the Terrace and populating it with the green, yellow, and orange chairs.

Sometime in early April (depending on the weather, but it’s often a little chilly), Union staff puts out a call for Terrace lovers to prepare for the chairs’ return. Volunteers line up an hour in advance, waiting for facilities staff to unload trucks and line the chairs up along the side of the building.

With a signal given via megaphone, volunteers carry the chairs down to the Terrace, passing by members of the always-entertaining Badger Band and a very happy Bucky Badger.

The sunburst season has officially begun.

“Terrace season means it’s time to start building connections, having a good time, running into past friends, and enjoying some sun,” says Iffat Bhuiyan ’18, last year’s Wisconsin Union student president.

The final touch to the day? Free Babcock Dairy ice cream and the first of many relaxing times on the Terrace.

Just hours after she said, “I do,” during her March 2018 ceremony, Jenelle Selig Olson ’15 and her new husband and college sweetheart, Erick Olson ’12, were twirling around the dance floor of Great Hall in Memorial Union. Little did she know her husband had planned for a special guest to stop by their reception: Buckingham U. Badger.

“Bucky was definitely a highlight,” Jenelle says. “Not knowing he’s coming, and then [you] turn around and some Bucky is there dancing with you — that’s just awesome. Also, you can’t beat the Terrace.”

The Union’s first wedding, between Fang Chu and Tsao Shih Wang ’27, MA’28, PhD’29 in May 1929, was likely a smaller affair. Nowadays, Union weddings are so popular that the UW has two full-time wedding planners and an intern who coordinate the days’ many facets.

Hopeful couples enter a lottery 18 months in advance. When their names are pulled, they can pick from available dates and venues — Tripp Commons, Great Hall, or Varsity Hall at Union South. During the academic year, school events take priority, but the Union can host up to nine weddings in a single summer weekend, notes Hattie Paulin, the Union’s wedding director.

Leading up to the event, Paulin sends checklists, arranges tastings, and sometimes plays therapist to stressed-out couples and family members. The Union only requires that couples pay a small event fee and use its catering services. Everything else can be customized, from the chef preparing family recipes to the waitstaff dressing as Disney characters.

The Union was the first venue Jenelle considered after she and Erick got engaged. Because she served as Paulin’s intern while she was earning her engineering degree, Jenelle knew how much care Union staff put into planning and executing a wedding day.

“The staff knows the true meaning of having a wedding there, and what it means to me and my family, and it was just a huge weight off my shoulders,” Jenelle says.

Of course, there are always last-minute glitches that no one anticipates, Paulin says. But with a game plan and some professional guidance, couples are able to enjoy a day dedicated to their love story.

“The couple can sit back and look and say, ‘Wow, this is awesome,’ ” she says. “ ‘This is exactly what we wanted it to be.’ ”

Photo by Bryce Richter

Professors Hans Zoerb ’70, PhD’83 and Jim Steele focus on three main themes: unifying scientific concepts, dairy products, and fermentation — which is where beer comes in. All students must have taken Biochemistry 501: Introduction to Biochemistry so that they have a firm grasp of metabolic flux. Though it sounds like something out of Back to the Future, metabolic flux refers to where and how carbon flows through a cell. “That’s truly fermentation sciences at its most basic,” Steele says.

This class has been taught for several semesters, but it caught the attention of Wisconsin Brewing Company’s brewmaster, Kirby Nelson, last semester. Steele held an extension short course during Madison Craft Beer Week and brought Nelson in as a guest speaker. While exploring the department’s mini-brewery in Babcock Hall — a donation from MillerCoors — Nelson met Charlie Coogan x’16, an FS375 student. Coogan and Matt Arbuckle x’16 were brewing a milk stout for class. Nelson tried the beer, loved it, and the collaboration took off.

This year’s class became a contest. Broken into three groups, the students took the basic fermentation concepts they’d learned and created their own 5.5 percent ABV red lager. In April, the brews went to a panel of judges, consisting of Nelson; the Great Dane Pub and Brewing Company’s brewmaster, Rob LoBreglio; David Rider of MillerCoors; and two supervisors from Memorial Union. The judges picked a winner and sent the recipe to the Wisconsin Brewing Company in Verona, Wisconsin, to be brewed en masse. On May 1, Inaugural Red debuted at the Terrace.

With the success of Inaugural Red, Steele and Zoerb are working on the next big thing: a fermented foods and beverages certificate, which will combine aspects of food chemistry, food engineering, fermentation sciences, microbial physiology, and business and marketing. “Research, teach, and extension,” Steele says. “It is truly the Wisconsin Idea.”

Newlyweds Matt Hill and Jessi Hill ’12 pose for a photographer at the Memorial Union’s swimming pier on a June evening before heading to their wedding reception at Tripp Commons. No word on whether the swimmers also crashed the reception.

Photo: Bryce Richter

On summer nights for more than three decades, it’s been location, location, location for those who settle in to watch free movies on the Memorial Union Terrace.

In the age of surround sound and stadium seating, moviegoers who crowd the Memorial Union Terrace on Monday nights each summer make a deliberate choice to eschew those creature comforts for the atmosphere and lake breezes.

Since 1978, the Wisconsin Union Directorate film committee has sponsored free movies on the Terrace. Originally called Starlight Cinema, a name later co-opted by an avant-garde film series, Lakeside Cinema brings action, comedy, and cult classics to its outdoor audience.

Each summer centers on a theme. Last year’s — quests — kicked off with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Other recent themes highlighted movies from the 1990s, including Wayne’s World, and musical classics such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The moviegoing experience vastly improved last summer with the purchase of a high-definition projector and a new screen (replacing what looked like a bed sheet with a line down the middle). The image on the screen is now bigger and brighter, and the dialogue and action scenes are easier to hear over conversations at nearby tables.

UW students and city residents gather on the Terrace as the sunset paints the sky and motorboats bob offshore with lights illuminated. Serious viewers plant themselves front and center, and some look as though they have been there since midafternoon, surviving on provisions offered by the brat stand.

As dusk makes way for dark, empty chairs are annexed from neighboring tables and maneuvered to ensure a better vantage point for watching the screen. Some viewers sit on the low stone wall that runs midway through the Terrace, and others park folding chairs on the narrow patch of grass behind. On one summer night, a bride and groom made their way through the crowd, eating ice cream cones.

Music blares from speakers before the projector turns on. People cheer when a familiar movie title comes up on the screen, primed to laugh at famous lines and savor their favorite cinematic moments, along with the summer night.

An architectural drawing of the improvements to Memorial Union’s theater wing reflects changes made following public meetings to discuss the design. The Union withdrew plans for a larger extension of the lobby and replaced them with this smaller version. Courtesy of the Memorial Union Reinvestment Project.

Memorial Union scales back its plan to renovate the theater lobby.

Responding to concerns from students and faculty, the Wisconsin Union has withdrawn a plan for a large expansion of the theater lobby and replaced it with a smaller version.

“We’ve made a drastic cut in size,” says Colin Plunkett x’12, the student manager for the Memorial Union Reinvestment Project. “The change in the architecture, both in shape and size, better fits with the current building.”

In 2006, the UW’s student body voted to approve an increase in fees to pay for improvements to Memorial Union and to demolish and rebuild Union South. The latter project was completed in spring semester 2011, but the changes to Memorial Union — including improvements to the theater wing, on the west end of the Union Terrace, and upgrades to the original building — are not scheduled to begin until this summer.

The theater lobby expansion provoked surprise when images of its design were released in 2011. The plan presented to students in 2006 had included an expansion of the lobby, but a revised plan released last summer indicated the lobby would stretch fifty-two feet northward toward the lake. A group called SaveTheTerrace.org launched a campaign to halt the project, claiming that the new lobby would diminish the value of the Terrace by blocking airflow and views of the sunset.

In November, the Memorial Union Design Committee held public meetings to encourage input and discussion and found, according to Plunkett, that there was little enthusiasm for the large lobby. Instead, the Union’s design committee returned to the theater plan that had been developed originally, which included a more modest, thirty-foot expansion to the lobby.

“We felt it would be best to go back to the designs of 2006,” Plunkett says. “These were approved by the university, and they don’t make a major change in the shape of the theater.”

The improvements to Memorial Union and the Union Theater coincide with other redevelopments in the east campus area now called the Lakeshore Gateway. The Wisconsin Alumni Association (which publishes this magazine) is planning a project it calls Alumni Park. It will use private funds to replace a parking lot between the Union and Red Gym with a greenspace that runs from the lake to Langdon and includes an outdoor classroom, a promenade, and an arbor devoted to the Wisconsin Idea.

The new plan extends the Union Theater’s lobby 30 feet toward the lake, rather than the previous design’s 52 feet, leaving more space for the Terrace. Courtesy of the Memorial Union Reinvestment Project.

The state Department of Natural Resources has committed to improving dilapidated areas of the lakeshore in front of the Terrace this summer, and to remove the pier that had been built for the old Boat House, which was demolished in 1968. Alumni Park includes a new pier designed to improve the flow of water.

The first phase of work on Memorial Union, including the theater wing and the building’s fifth floor, is scheduled to begin in August and conclude in 2014, after which work will begin on the rest of the Union.