West Lafayette scraps closing State St. for Purdue game day after businesses balk

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – West Lafayette officials on Thursday scrapped plans to block State Street in the West Lafayette on the Saturday of Purdue University’s Homecoming, a day after the owners and managers of dozens of businesses signed a petition balking at the idea.

Erik Carlson, West Lafayette’s development director, said the city was taking the blame for springing the idea without running it past merchants and property owners well in advance of the Sept. 23 game day.

“We’re going to hit pause,” Carlson said. “There were a lot of misunderstandings about what we were trying to do. And that’s on us. We should have done a better job communicating it.”

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The plan had been to test drive a feature of the new, two-way reconfiguration of State Street that can turn a portion of the Village into a temporary pedestrian-only plaza from early that Saturday morning until the 4 p.m. kickoff of the Purdue-Michigan game. That plan would also include breakfast club, when Village bars open early to cater to costume-wearing party crowd on football Saturdays.

The new design of State Street, when it reopened in August after a summer of construction, includes places where posts can be put into spots on State Street, Northwestern Avenue and Pierce Street to create a car-free zone in the Village, roughly from Chauncey Hill Mall to Harry’s Chocolate Shop.

Business owners circulated a petition earlier this week after learning about the concept in a Journal & Courier article. By Wednesday, they had 41 businesses signed onto a petition that contended that a closed street “added one more reason for customers to avoid the Village.”

John von Erdmannsdorff, owner of Von’s Shops on State Street, said he received a signature at all 41 businesses he went to this week as he carried the petition.

“When their reason to do this is because it will help the businesses, that’s hard to maintain when the businesses say they’re not in favor of this,” von Erdmannsdorff said after receiving word from Carlson Thursday afternoon. “The fact that we asked the city not to do it and that they hit the pause button on this, that’s responsiveness we don’t often get.”

Carlson said the city believes it still has a case to make for a festival, pedestrian-only atmosphere in the Village on special occasions, including football games.

“A lot of this is showing that this isn’t about keeping people out of the Village but to bring people into the Village,” Carlson said. “We can do a better job rolling this out and showing how this can be a good thing.”

Carlson said the State Street plaza will be tried during a home Purdue football game later this season. Which game, he said, hadn't been decided as of Thursday. Beyond the Sept. 23 game against Michigan, Purdue has home games Oct. 7 against Minnesota, Oct. 28 against Nebraska, Nov. 4 against Illinois and Nov. 25 against Indiana.