By Dan Tortorice
Friends of Lake View Hill Park
Dane County plans to remove two buildings in Lake View Hill Park that were associated with Lake View Sanatorium. They have reached the end of their viability.
The maintenance building, pictured here, has an interesting history. It was the dairy for the hospital. The sanatorium was built at the beginning of the Great Depression, when money was scarce. The milk to feed more than a hundred patients and staff was purchased raw from local farmers and pasteurized there to save money.
The power plant behind it once had a tall brick chimney that dominated the skyline.
When the Dormitory for Help was demolished a decade ago, Dane County and the Wisconsin DNR collaborated to use its underground tunnel to the maintenance building as a kind of bat cave to assist those creatures whose population was being decimated by white nose disease, a fungus that flourished in flooded natural caves. The bats never came, so the entrance will be removed during demolition.
