Closing the Strip

 Carbondale Main Street announced that the State has approved officially closing Illinois Avenue from the intersection of College all the way north to Elm street for a Homecoming concert. This will be quite a long closure with the three block stretch shutting down at 11 a.m. Friday morning and reopening at 2 a.m. Saturday morning, then I figure it will close down again later Saturday morning for the Homecoming parade.

Rather interesting that the first concert starts at 6 second concert starts at 8:30. I would think, if they are targeting college students, they would start later in the evening as that is when students would start coming out.

Halloween 2

City Council voted to remove the remaining restrictions on Halloween bar openings last night and now people can buy kegs without restriction as well.

Meanwhile, The Southern keeps re purposing 20 year old photos of Halloween celebrations past in its accompaniments to their stories about the change. You would think they would have a more recent photo showing more recent Halloween festivities.

People are not going to block the Strip any more. For one thing, the state is much more aggressive about not letting people block a state highway, then it was 20 years ago. Number 2, the city has an ordinance in place forbidding groups of people from congregating on sidewalks in the evening for long periods of time, mainly to prevent things like students "taking the Strip".

While students would regularly close down the Strip every weekend in the 1990s, I cannot recall any instances of it happening since the turn of the century, due to stepped up enforcement.