Halloween isn’t what it used to be on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin.
Last Sunday, the main gathering point for the university town’s annual Halloween bash saw a throng of heavily boozed cross-dressers, walking food products and pop-culture oddities slowly crawling about at almost 1:30 Sunday morning, closing time here.
But Molly Kelley, a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pointed at the large unpopulated gaps of littered concrete from a balcony overlooking the seven block stretch. “Two years ago this place was packed like sardines,” she says. “You couldn’t move. Either you got run over by [police] horses or climbed on light poles.”