Trombones, booze and dancing: stories from the Ped Mall

IOWA CITY - The beer band plays the Hawkeye victory polka on the dance floor at the Fieldhouse, and the place explodes.

People are jumping up and down, pumping their arms, and singing at the top of their lungs. Red spotlights drop and shift across the crowd. Trombone slides and tuba horns swing back and forth over the fray.

“In heaven there is no beer/No beer!/That's why we drink it here!”

The black and gold checkered floor has a mirror wall on one side. Above, a balcony lined with faces rings the space, and over the mirror wall, ESPN Sportscenter is projected against a huge white screen. No one is watching.

Tomorrow is the first home football game of the season. It's the third weekend of the school year. The beer band, an unofficial gathering of marching band members, has been whirling from bar to bar, drinking, dancing, and serenading the mob.

Outside on the bricks of the Pedestrian Mall, the air is infused with a certain urgency. For what, it's not clear, but it's there, and it feels like youth, sex, tipsiness, an autumn breeze. Several thousand gorgeous human beings are here. They will never again in their lives be this gorgeous. And they are drinking $2 beer at sweaty nightclubs, smoking cigarettes under streetlamps, falling down, getting arrested, getting to know each other, fighting, pouting, kissing, hugging, crying, yelling and laughing.

Almost 35 years after the Iowa City Council decided to block College and Dubuque Streets off to automobiles, the Ped Mall is perhaps the most distinctive public space in Iowa. It is also a regular center of controversy.

A string of random beatings in front of bars this spring put the downtown on edge, and the city council has pressured bar owners to crack down on underage drinking. Two bars – the Fieldhouse is one of them – face the likelihood of losing their liquor licenses because police too often catch underage drinkers inside. And a string of sexual attacks on young women over the past two years has driven home the point that alcohol can so often become a weapon - especially against young women.

Despite all this, on a Friday evening, children call out on the playground as the lights snap off at the public library. Couples take dinner in the open air with silver and white cloth napkins. A hippie with a red guitar plays the blues on the corner.

There's no place like the Ped Mall 'round these parts. What are your stories from the downtown Iowa City bar scene? Do you spend any time there? Whether you've been there or not, what do you think about it? Do you care? Please leave a comment.

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