Madi­son is known for the mas­sive Hal­loween party that breaks out every year on State Street (the main pedestrian/bike/bus drag adja­cent to cam­pus). In the past few years, either the cel­e­bra­tions or the police (depend­ing on who you talk to) have got­ten out of hand, and riot shields, pep­per spray, and even tear gas have made appear­ances. So nat­u­rally, I had to go see what all the fuss was about.

This year, the city sought to con­tain the par­ty­ing, and worked with stu­dents to find a happy medium between bed­lam and bore­dom. They solu­tion at which they arrived was to fence off State Street, charge admis­sion, and add a cou­ple of live music stages to enable them to call it an ‘event’ and jus­tify the entrance fee. The sta­tus of the event was sort of up in the air; in fact, the fol­low­ing legally dubi­ous dis­claimer was printed on the back of the tickets:

The Hal­loween event on State Street is not spon­sored by the City of Madi­son or any other entity. No per­mit has been issued for this event. An admis­sion fee is charged solely for the pur­pose of pay­ing for some of the pub­lic safety costs gen­er­ated by the spon­ta­neous occur­rence of this event…

Tick­ets for a spon­ta­neous, non-sponsored event? An admis­sion fee for an event that takes place on a pub­lic street and has no per­mit? I make no claims of real legal knowl­edge, but some­thing seems wrong here.

The Cos­tumed Masses

Any­way, I went out with friends Veron­ica and Chelle at first. We walked all the way up State, look­ing at cos­tumes, but ended up at a bar out­side the offi­cial party zone, as we didn’t feel like wait­ing in line. Then, we con­nected with another group and did a lit­tle party hop­ping on and around State. By about 1:15, we had ended up back in the thick of things, and were wait­ing in line for a restaurant/bar. As we were stand­ing there, a long line of police­men started fil­ing in the near­est entrance. There must have been twenty-five or thirty in that group, and there were many entrances up and down the street.

Street Evan­ge­lists

Curi­ous about how the time change would be han­dled, we asked a cop and learned that they would start clear­ing the street at the first 1:30 (2 a.m. becom­ing 1 a.m. at the change). Since that meant we only had about ten min­utes left, most of us decided to bag the bar and started walk­ing up the street. Our des­ti­na­tion was the sec­ond floor State St. apart­ment of Jen­nifer (who was part of the group we’d joined ear­lier), from which we would have a good view of what­ever hap­pened when the cops started break­ing up the party.

We thought we had plenty of time, but as we reached an inter­sec­tion, the police started drag­ging fences across the road, in order to com­part­men­tal­ize the par­ty­ing. We man­aged to run past two mov­ing fences and made it to the block for which we were aim­ing. We pro­ceeded to watch from Jennifer’s win­dows (later, we ven­tured back down to the street to watch, as well) as police on foot, motor­cy­cle, and horse­back pro­ceeded to clear the area.

Police stand by under
the sta­dium lights

The whole thing had a very 1984 sort of vibe. The police pres­ence was mas­sive, and the offi­cers were garbed in some­thing between stan­dard uni­forms and full riot gear. A recorded announce­ment played peri­od­i­cally, thank­ing par­ty­go­ers for attend­ing, but encour­ag­ing them to leave the area so that clean-up crews could pre­pare for the fol­low­ing busi­ness day. Also, huge portable sta­dium lights lent an oth­er­worldly glow to the entire area.

Appar­ently the new mea­sures worked, there were about half as many arrests as last year, and no riot shields or large-scale chem­i­cal weaponry were employed. It was a fun time, but a lit­tle odd. Oh, and what was my cos­tume? I’ve been wait­ing for this one:

Click any of the thumb­nails above for larger ver­sions, or look at the entire (small) gallery here.