Third Place Review: Rotunda Cafe
While you wait,
The most notable thing to know about the Rotunda Cafe is that it is a coffee shop in a bank. And it is a remote-worker hang out. All of this is squashed into a functional bank; the teller is in the back.
Like all buildings with a classical and neoclassical architectural element, the rotunda feels stately, important, touched with old history: pillars greet you on the street and inside the round room with sunlight from a domed skylight. A round circle of pillars and a center open floor with marble-seeming interior, lots of windows — an open area to mingle and greet.
The Rotunda Cafe/Bank sits on Schenk's Corner, a historic area in Madison that dates back to 19th century. The corner is named after Herbert C. Schenk, a longtime businessman and politician. Now today, the corner is in this kind-of triangle of Winnebago and Atwood streets. A bar, another cafe eatery, tattoo shop, massage/sauna and newer apartments all are some of business that now flank this corner, along with a bustle of commuters every workday morning hurtling left off of Atwood.
Inside the rotunda a ring light hangs from the domed skylight. To me, the ring light conjures a thought of influences with a ring light hovering in the iris of your favorite talking face TikTok star/provider of information.
Lake Ridge Bank hosts the cafe and many open tables with roller chairs. There are also private rooms that can be booked for calls and meetings. This incudes the "Atwood Podcasting" booth. In the back there is a wall of incredible light behind the vault. It's soft and buttery like an high class cocktail lounge.
The decorations and design feel obsessed with the 20th century, but with the pieces 21st century media soul. You've got vinyl records for sale, a Pearl Jam banner, a "Friends" Central Perk pot with a plant. Frank Ocean and Taylor Swift both come on in the background while I hang in here.
There are old record speakers with Rotunda printed in the center. A coffee grinder and typewriter. A Willie Nelson A track displayed, but unable to be played. Old Motorola radios sit for aesthetics and nostalgia aroma for the eyes. There are bowls with pine cones. A classic Coca-Cola drink cart stands in front of a door that on the morning of my visit just had two armed guards pop out of after delivering cash supplies to the ATM. Both clanged back to their armored vehicle.
On one wall is a Monopoly guy neon sign with green dollar signs plastered over the eyes (meant to be ironic or laughing at the whole you're-drinking-an-americano-in-a-bank?) Obama's latest memoir and Quest Love's creativity books are on a self with a 1999 book on Modern Design.
To my untrained eye the furniture is smooth, inspired from 60s and 70s (or maybe the 20s and 30s after flipping through the Modern Design book – flat surfaces in earth toned colors and wood arm rests.) The podcast room has old headphones and a radio, all for show. And yet, this space is for 2025 economic activity: white collar meetings, zoom chats, Wi-Fi raptors, office workers with AirPods and memorized-seven-syllable drink orders popping in after a run or yoga.
It's the new bolted with the old — like imagining hover boards slinging past the Roman Colosseum or selfie-sticks on the Great Wall of China. Cafes inside of Rotunda built banks.
A line comes to mind from the intro in W. David Marx's book Status and Culture:
Why does internet culture feel less valuable than what we experienced in the analog world? Why does everything feel less cool than before?
To me, all these objects from the 20th century — the current love for vinyl records, for example — is partly around this question. The culture thinks, and feels, that the analog (pre-internet) culture was cooler. Maybe. The owners of this cafe, which has been around for a couple years at least, according to the bank teller and barista, are trying to capture a piece of that in this room. It's cool to hang here. Feel at ease here from the chaos and instability of cyberspace.
I don't have the answers, but in the eight o' clock hour on a Wednesday drinking coffee in this spot, I feel that. It's crowded though with all this stuff; almost too curated, borderline cringe. If I had a remote work-from-home job though, I'd work here. I worked remote for three years in a different city and never had access to such tables and public bustle; and such grown-up access.
Even with its analog 20th-century fetish, I feel something else as the minutes tick by and people fill-in having conversations. It's something else that kind of got vaporized and eaten by the internet age: seeing other people. Talking about the news, the tasks of their job and life.
Hope your name gets called soon.
**
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_C._Schenk
https://www.lakeridge.bank/locations/schenk's-corner
page xxvii, 3d graph from the introduction of W. David Marx's Status and Culture.