From the curved, central, five-story bank of windows on the front of the Dane County Courthouse facing South Hamilton Street, there’s a spectacular, sweeping view above the trees across miles of Madison’s West Side.
At least there would be, if the windows were clean enough to show it.
Since 2006, when the courthouse opened, those windows have been cleaned only twice — the last time seven years ago — because the building has lacked a reliable way to get window cleaners up there to clear away the years of dust, grime, and frankly, spider poop.
The bank of windows illuminates the lobbies of courtroom floors four through eight. The windows tower above the fourth-floor outdoor garden, and the roof of the building extends high over the top of the garden. Hanging ropes from the roof doesn’t allow window cleaners to get anywhere close to the windows.
This week, a crew of cleaners taking on that curved central bank of windows is making use of a newly installed system of rooftop anchors, devised after years of deliberation, that will make it much easier to clean those panes.
Thanks to the new system, cleaning the windows might even become an annual task.
Initial building plans had called for a track system mounted on the ceiling along the top of the windows, but that plan didn’t get far, said Todd Draper, director of Dane County Public Works.
Instead, when it came time to clean that portion of the building, a crew with a boom truck had to be hired, a major undertaking since the truck had to be leveled using gravel poured onto South Hamilton Street. The operation also had to be done on a weekend so the street could be closed.
And even then, Draper said, window cleaners could not reach the tops of the central windows on the eighth floor. They had to use long poles to reach the top 10 to 15 feet of glass, which didn’t allow for a very thorough cleaning.
The last cleaning that way, in 2016, cost around $8,200 just for that front bank of windows, Draper said.
Officials had also considered, but rejected, putting a scaffold on the rooftop garden for window cleanings, he said.
Trying to come up with a system for cleaning the windows has been a “collective concern” and years in the making, Draper said. Ideas came and went, but through it all, judges and other officials who work in the courthouse said something had to be done.
“It was a really interesting problem because you really can’t see out these windows very well,” because of the dirt, he said.
Some ideas came close, but the final plan ultimately was devised by Strategic Structural Design, a local structural engineering firm.
Installing the new system was no small feat, Draper said.
To reach the large, curved section of windows, seven holes were cut into the roof high above a fourth-floor roof garden, each about a foot from the windows, and sleeves were installed into the holes.
On the roof, above the sleeved holes and welded into the building superstructure, are steel beams mounted on posts that ropes can be tied to, then fed through the holes. Ropes are used to raise and lower a platform for window cleaners to work.
The bid for installing the anchoring system, doing a weight load test on the system and cleaning the glass, was $341,000, Draper said. Doing the cleaning work this week is Jack’s Maintenance Service, a sub-contractor of Joe Daniels Construction, which had installed the anchors.
The glass is being scrubbed — the streaked spider droppings especially take some elbow grease to remove — and then coated with a protective film, Draper said.
The rooftop anchors, which can be used by window cleaners to reach all of the building’s windows, were installed last spring and summer and were tested for the first time a few weeks ago.
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Nick Minkebig of Jack’s Maintenance Service pressure washes grime off windows Wednesday at the Dane County Courthouse. He is standing on a scaffold supported by a recently installed anchor system on the building's roof that gives window cleaners much easier access to the large, curved bank of windows at the front of the building. Because the windows have been so hard to reach, they've only been cleaned twice since the courthouse opened in 2006.
J. Eric Urtes, a project engineer for the city of Madison, walks past one of the recently installed anchors on the roof of the Dane County Courthouse, part of a new system that finally gives window cleaners access to the curved bank of windows on the front of the building.
Nick Minkebig and Mike Duiehring of Jack’s Maintenance Service stand on a scaffold that makes use of a new anchoring system to clean exterior windows at the Dane County Courthouse.
On Monday, before a cleaning project this week got started, this was the way the windows looked on the eighth floor of the Dane County Courthouse. The last cleaning was in 2016.