State Street: The Mile Between Two Worlds

State Street runs a little under a mile, from the southwest corner of the Capitol Square to the edge of the University of Wisconsin campus at Library Mall. It is a street that connects the seat of government to a community of roughly fifty thousand students, and for more than a century it has absorbed whatever those two institutions were producing at any given moment: law, protest, commerce, music, argument.

The street was a conventional four-lane road until nineteen seventy-four, when the city converted it to a pedestrian mall with limited vehicle access. Only buses, emergency vehicles, bicycles, and delivery trucks are allowed. The extra-wide sidewalks that resulted have accommodated everything from regular Saturday foot traffic to the outdoor gatherings that followed major university events.

For much of the twentieth century, State Street's bars and music venues served as the city's informal commons. Graduate students and undergraduates mixed with state legislators and Capitol staffers and farmers who had come to town for the Farmers Market. The street was where you went if you wanted to be in Madison, rather than merely living here.

The stretch of State Street visible from the Capitol steps is the same stretch that was visible in the nineteen thirties, though the storefronts have changed. The bones of the street, its width, its angle, the way it aims a pedestrian toward the dome at one end and toward Bascom Hill at the other, are a product of James Duane Doty's eighteen thirty-six plat, which aligned the city's main artery to make the Capitol visible from the campus before either building had been constructed.

It is a street designed to remind you, at both ends, of what the city thought it was for.