EDITORIAL: Let the heart of Port define the city

We live in a different world, we who are the fortunate residents of the small towns of southeastern Wisconsin. We are in the minority of Americans whose homes are in compact communities in which the traditional features and values of small-town living thrive yet are near the services and cultural offerings of urban areas.

Port Washington is the classic model of that way of life. No nostalgia is needed to evoke the cherished images of small-town America here. They are on daily display in this city of 13,000 people—the bustling downtown along a few walkable blocks on a single main business street, embraced by residential neighborhoods old and new, schools, churches and parks, with nature in appealing forms nearby.

Those characteristics underline how bizarre is the juxtaposition of this small community with one of the biggest data center complexes ever conceived. The data centers will technically be in the city, thanks to the Common Council’s decision to annex nearly 2,000 acres of countryside for their sprawling buildings and power stations, but their presence cannot be allowed to take away from the way of living that distinguishes small-town Port Washington.

The people of this small town can ensure that won’t happen by rallying around the institutions that bind the community, especially the downtown, which is the heart of Port Washington in more ways than its central location.

Small towns exist because of their downtowns. Cities and villages were born as small but growing centers of commercial activity that attracted people to live around them and form the institutions required for an organized community. 

Vital downtowns were an existential requirement then and they are now. Today’s Port Washington meets that standard with vitality in capital letters and exclamation points, but that was not always true.

The transition to the shopping-mall era from the prosperous times when the Port downtown was the only convenient source for the necessities of life for residents of the city and the surrounding trade area was trying. Storefronts selling groceries, meat, bakery, pharmaceuticals, clothing, shoes, hardware and sporting goods—commerce that brought so many shoppers downtown on Friday nights that police had to direct traffic—went vacant, some to be converted to offices, others to temporary quarters for transitory businesses.

As the business of the downtown withered, so too did its spirit.

To measure how far Port has come since that not-too-distant time, compare it to the downtown activity on just about any weekend or day in 2025, or to the Small Business Saturday on Nov. 29 that had stores filled chockablock with shoppers undeterred by a snowstorm, or to the Christmas on the Corners event that on a frigid afternoon and evening filled the downtown with not just shoppers but with families rejoicing in the warmth of a small town’s holiday spirit.

The city owes that progress to the citizen-driven initiatives to establish the Business Improvement District, Main Street and the Tourism Council. These are not government entities, though their funding is facilitated by the city in collecting a BID tax paid by downtown property owners that supports the Main Street organization’s promotional efforts and the room tax that funds the Tourism Council.

The remarkable success of these efforts is evident in the vibrant shops of Port Washington, almost all independently owned by merchants who work with their staffs in the stores. 

Their diverse offerings of quality merchandise are reason enough for robust customer support, but the people of Port Washington have other incentives for loyalty to their downtown. The businesses there pay taxes to support local schools and city services and many of them are generous to nonprofit causes. But most important, they keep the heart of the city beating.

Because of the national notoriety of the monstrous Vantage data center campus and the increasingly bitter opposition it is engendering, many people will know of Port Washington only as the home of one of the world’s largest data centers.

That is as unavoidable as it is unfortunate, but it can’t be allowed to define Port Washington. For that, go downtown.