On a Food Truck Friday the patio at Garver Feed Mill is buzzing. A band warms up while customers queue at six food trucks and an outdoor bar. Families with babies relax in lawn chairs, toddlers twirl to the music, young professionals socialize on barstools, retirees chat on outdoor couches.
This mix is the goal for Garver Events, Garver Feed Mill’s events arm. While private events are still the business’s bread and butter, Garver’s leadership is committed to building partnerships to host community events, according to Bethany Jurewicz, director of public programming and business operations.
Food Truck Fridays, which began in 2024, are again being held weekly throughout the summer with a rotating mix of food trucks and musicians. Other public events include the Dane County Farmers’ Market late winter market. This year Garver hosted the multi-day Sessions music festival in June. It was Garver’s biggest event yet, Jurewicz says.
Longtime music festival organizer Bob Queen formerly held the concert series at McPike Park. Jurewicz says she had worked with Queen to hold concerts on the Garver patio during the pandemic, and suggested that Garver Events could handle the permitting, AV and other logistics for Sessions. Queen took her up on the offer and booked the musicians.
Hosting community events draws a range of people into the expansive former sugar beet factory. It’s a deliberate strategy to support the 15 local businesses that call Garver home. “Anything that we do as Garver Events is providing a customer for all the other businesses in the building,” Jurewicz says.
That’s why at first she didn’t even charge another community group, the Cheers Community Choir, to meet in the space. As the group grew to nearly 200 members, though, it started paying a minimal rental fee for chairs. “There aren’t a lot of places that you could have a 200-person choir [meet] casually on Monday nights,” Jurewicz says. To encourage other nonprofits to use the space, Garver Events gives them all a 25% discount on space rentals (with the exception of Saturdays April through December).
Garver puts on a few of its own community events as well, including Femmestival, the annual food and art festival Jurewicz and Madison Rep. Francesca Hong designed to support female and BIPOC artists and entrepreneurs. Another in-house offering is a parent-child happy hour series, which offers kid-friendly activities like pumpkin carving while parents enjoy a drink or bite to eat at the Garver lounge. The idea came to Jurewicz when she saw kids bringing rollerblades and Nerf guns into the building, drawn to the large open space.
The community-oriented ethos extends to the building’s other tenants. Ian’s Pizza holds “Dough-Nation Nights” donating a percentage of sales to area elementary schools and nonprofits. Roll Play, the tabletop game cafe, hosts social game nights. And one business, GROW Greenhouse, beautifies the space for everyone with houseplants and pots for sale displayed along walls and walkways throughout the two stories, making it technically the city’s largest houseplant store.
On the second floor, Kosa Spa is also seeking to expand its community offerings, when they make their spa services available at a lower cost, says owner Shilpa Sankaran. Last month the spa hosted a community social sauna party with a DJ and herbal THC-infused drinks available from partner business RA! Wellness. The ayurvedic spa also hosts twice annual community cleanses.
Jurewicz is also passionate about supporting local artists. She has a visual arts background and serves on the Madison Arts Commission. “So many visual artists will tell me that they’re moving or they’re leaving because there isn’t enough of an economy to support their practice here,” she says.
Jurewicz curates Garver’s art gallery, Garver Canvas. Besides displaying pieces in the space as a traditional gallery, she’s found success with more experiential models including a residency and a pop-up shop. The building also hosts an art vending machine, where passersby can purchase greeting cards, stickers and playing cards designed by local artists, and other unusual finds.
The building itself has a history of supporting artists, says Bryant Moroder, who as part of the Garver development team functions as a very involved landlord. “There was an architect who actually lived in the building for a period of time up on the second floor where the salon is now,” he says. This was when the feed mill operation was winding down and no longer needed all of the space, explains Moroder. The architect, who lived there with his wife and dog, served as the watchman for the property.
Moroder hopes to find ways to tell more of the building’s history. First opened as a sugar beet factory in 1906, it became a feed mill in the 1920s. Baum Revision LLC, which redeveloped the property for the city of Madison, preserved many of the original features including the brickwork.
It opened in its current form in the summer of 2019. “Global pandemic was not on our list of worst-case scenarios,” says Jurewicz of the risk assessment she did as part owner of Garver Events. Yet just months after opening, Garver shut down to the public.
Moroder credits a commitment to the arts and to community as vital to getting through the COVID-19 pandemic. Several tenants came together to use an online ordering app and Moroder helped tenants access whatever local or federal government support they could. The 14,000 square feet of outdoor patio space was also a safer way to reach customers. In spite of the pandemic, only two tenants have turned over since Garver opened.
As for future plans, some would like to see a permanent food truck pod at Garver.
That is a possibility, says Parks Superintendent Eric Knepp, though it’s not part of the planning that’s been completed for the park land directly north of Garver. A brownfield site still needing remediation, Garver has used part of this space as an overflow parking lot. More planning and public input needs to happen before the space is redeveloped, likely in stages, adds Knepp.
Knepp sees creative partnerships as key to several of Madison’s best parks, and Garver is uniquely positioned, surrounded on either side by city parkland. It has relieved some of the event pressure from the Olbrich Gardens, and Garver Events holds the liquor license for all events at Olbrich, too, providing bar service for weddings and other functions.
He anticipates Garver being a reliable partner for the redevelopment of the north plat as well. “I don’t see our relationship with Garver today as subsidization of a private business,” he says. “I see it as a private business stepping into a space that’s a really tough market, and partnering with us.”
That partnership mentality is central to how Garver has survived and thrived so far. “A large part of how I approach community programming here is [asking] how many artists, musicians and small business owners can I support with one large event?” says Jurewicz.
Her next challenge is figuring out how to attract a new demographic to the public programming already embraced by the surrounding neighborhoods. When she sees empty parking spaces on Food Truck Fridays, she’s glad so many people can walk or bike to attend, but she wants all of Madison to enjoy Garver.
“How do we get west-siders to come?” Jurewicz asks.
