If you’ve lived in Champaign-Urbana long enough to experience the academic year’s cycle, you know the unique relationship that the surrounding area has with Campustown. Long-term C-U residents know how to plan their schedules around the events of the University of Illinois, and around the students that go there.
Having lived in Champaign all my life, I am no exception.
I grew up intuitively understanding the moments where living in a college town makes things logistically difficult, and that is most true when thinking about food.
I know to avoid nice restaurants on Moms Weekend, Dads Weekend, and the week of Homecoming. I understand that anything remotely close to Neil Street will be packed on the afternoons after football games and evenings before basketball games. I know that, in periods where the students are returning from breaks, there is nothing available at any big box store. (My parents like to joke that they descend on North Prospect’s Target like a plague of locusts. But not to worry — as former locusts themselves, it is always with great fondness.)
But the most important understanding about food as a townie is to know that Green Street belongs to the students.
Before I started going to the University, the students’ summer exodus was a relief. In fact, the emptiness of Green Street specifically always felt special to me— restaurants have shorter wait times, traffic eases up and you can hang out on campus without running into hordes of college kids.
Walking down a summer-emptied Green Street as a townie, there’s almost an excitement that you’re getting away with something, like you’ve snuck past the proverbial “Students Only” signage and could be caught at any minute. It felt adventurous to try restaurants that were nearly off-limits before, and of course it was always convenient to be one of very few customers.
Now that I live on campus year-round, that emptiness feels completely different.
That cautious feeling of freedom, knowing that Green Street is only temporarily a townie-friendly zone, holds no more excitement for me.
On any given night during the school year, this restaurant-packed section of campus is filled with all the best moments of college life. It’s an unspoken camaraderie, a fraction of big-city bustle in this ventricle of the heart of campus. Simply seeing so many of your fellow students at once inspires this feeling of being part of something larger, the same way gathering in Gies Memorial Stadium or the State Farm Center helps us affirm the more athletic side of our school spirit.
The reasons I only ventured onto Green Street in the summer before I was a student are now the very thing I miss. An empty Green Street is most representative of the overall campus lull in the summer. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful, and for faculty, staff and townies it’s a breath of fresh air. I don’t begrudge anyone the opportunity for forays into a previously student-centric territory, especially having enjoyed them myself.
But for students, an empty campus is lonely. Green Street becomes a ghost town, made all the more emotionally potent because we know exactly what we’re missing out on. As a townie, the absence of noise and people was freeing, but as a student, it just doesn’t feel like home. It’s like some great cosmic hand has simply held up the sands of time, and we are the few grains that trickle through during these long, slow months of summer.
But hey, at least the line at Chipotle doesn’t go out the door anymore.