The name-calling back and forth continued through the next three decades. Often the project would seem back on track, only to be scuttled. In the late 1960s Taliesin Architects prepared, at the city's request, an ambitious master plan for the "Monona Basis Project," utilizing approximately three miles of the lake shoreline, including the Monona Terrace site, for a development that included a performing arts center. Bids came in over budget, however, and conservative mayor Bill Dyke spiked the project. Fittingly, perhaps, it was Dyke's longtime antagonist, Paul Soglin (who defeated Dyke in a 1973 mayoral race and returned to the mayor's chair in 1989), who saved the project from oblivion. Shortly after his election, Soglin quietly gathered some civic leaders along with Taliesin architects and essentially put a question to them: Could the Wright design be resurrected at Monona Terrace, only this time as a convention center rather than as an auditorium or theater? It could, and it has been -- although not without a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the ensuing seven years. A broad coaltion -- uniting Soglin with a conservative Republican governor and local leaders from both business and labor -- rallied enough community support to pass referenda in 1992 for financing and constructing the project. Visitors to the Monona Terrace Convention Center will find a stunning, semicircular structure that links Lake Monona with the domed state Capitol building and features floor to ceiling windows in a structure that actually extends 90 feet over the water. In the April 1997 issue of Madison Magazine, Madison native and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss remarked on the splendor of Monona Terrace, adding how "stunningly stupid" it was that it had taken 60 years to build. True enough. But you know what? It was worth the wait.