For
more than twenty years, State Street has been the
almost-auto-free avenue that connects the UW with
the rest of Madison. From latte-hopping to Halloween
parties to parades, it's the focus of the University's
social scene.
Now
it's also the focus of a new documentary. In Streets
without Cars, Brewer Stouffer and Troy
Lanier MA'01 show how State Street became one
of the few successes in the movement to create urban
pedestrian malls.
"More
than two hundred American cities experimented with
designating pedestrian malls in the sixties and seventies,"
says Stouffer, a technical writer at UW-Madison. "But
today, only a handful remain. Most became victims
to suburban shopping malls."
Streets
without Cars appeared at State Street's Orpheum
Theatre in April and May, and in July, it will be
shown on Wisconsin Public Television. Stouffer and
Lanier plan to enter a variety of film festivals,
where they hope the film will find a receptive audience.
"It's
ironic," says Stouffer. "On some level,
we're actually competing with suburbia in the same
way that pedestrian malls had to. Just as they competed
with suburban shopping malls, we're trying to win
an audience against Spiderman and Star Wars,
the stars of suburban cineplexes."
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