Feeling lucky with Phil Burkart
In honor of Town Square’s 10th anniversary on June 25, we will be sharing notable moments in our history. In 2011, Phil Burkart had recently moved to Green Lake and was one of the residents who gathered at Lynn Grout’s home to discuss repurposing the former courthouse into a community center. At these meetings, he met Fran Hill and the two would become co-founders of Town Square Community Center when it opened in 2012. Phil later spearheaded Town Square’s popular monthly bingo games, with the first held at Green Lake's Harvest Fest that same year.
What do an amoeba and Town Square have in common? According to Phil Burkart, a lot.
“We are like an amoeba,” he says. “Either you eat and grow and change to suit your environment or you die. What we've done is we eat and grow and change with our environment and we’ve thrived. It's always different and exciting. We aren't stuck on one thing.”
Phil believes the key to Town Square’s first 10 years of success has been its ability to evolve in meeting the needs and wants of the community. From a commercial kitchen to artist studios, a fitness center to a beer garden, the offerings at Town Square have been eclectic by necessity.
“We quickly realized that at over 60,000 square feet, our building was too big to do any one thing, so lots of the early ideas for the building - health, arts, education - all coalesced into Town Square,” Phil explains.
After the former courthouse was purchased for $1 in May 2012, the real work started. The ideas had to be put into action. Phil, who worked full time as owner of an insurance agency, spent most of his free moments at the courthouse ripping up carpet, emptying the building of left-behind furniture, and even dismantling the former courtroom jury box which was still intact. The entire courthouse campus was gutted, painted and remodeled with volunteer power over three months. These efforts were led by Phil and co-founder Fran Hill.
“I have blood, sweat and tears in this place, seriously,” Phil says. “At the grand opening in August 2012, I got my finger stuck in a door jam and I was bleeding everywhere. Fran and I were running around like chickens with our heads cut off.”
The month following Town Square’s grand opening, Green Lake held its popular Harvest Fest and the Town Square team was brainstorming ways to participate in the event while also raising money for their new nonprofit.
“Early on, there were a lot of people who had wanted a casino in the old courthouse, so we thought, why don't we have a bingo hall?,” Phil remembers. Phil used a $1,300 donation from his father’s memorial fund to start what would become one of Town Square’s most popular monthly events. Town Square bingo was modeled after the family-friendly games hosted on cruise ships, with fun door prizes, different themes and costumes.
“I bought a used bingo machine for $500, but otherwise we had nothing. Thrasher let us use their chairs and we borrowed tables from the American Legion, local churches, any organization that would lend them to us,” Phil says. “We emptied the upper floor of the safety building and had bingo up there and it became a thing, but it took a while before we earned enough to buy tables and chairs of our own. This has been a community effort all from the get-go.”
With the help of his wife, Linda, and friends Tracy and Laura Swayze, and Mark and Tonya Alling, Phil and the bingo crew pulled the games together each month. Today bingo takes place the last Saturday of every month and has drawn upwards of 24,000 players over the past decade. It is a significant source of income for Town Square.
“I've been coming to Green Lake since I was 9 or 10 years old. I caught my first walleye here, my first smallmouth, my first northern. It’s my place,” Phil says. “I've always wanted to give back to the community. I'm as proud of Town Square as anything I've ever done in business.”