Living in State College: Downtown

I’ve lived in State College for about 15 years, and I’ve realized that this place is surprisingly hard to explain to someone who has only ever visited.

So I thought I’d start writing about what it’s actually like to live here — not the tourism version, not a relocation brochure, and not just what you see on a Penn State football weekend.

And I figured the obvious place to start is Downtown.

Downtown State College gets reduced pretty quickly to “where the students are.”

And, obviously, there are a lot of students. Penn State is literally sitting beside it.

But when you actually live here, you realize the locals have their own version of Downtown.

You figure out which restaurants you love, which bars you like depending on the night, where you can actually sit down and have a drink, where you want brunch Sunday morning after a football game, which patios you want when the weather finally breaks, and which locally owned businesses you’ll go out of your way to support.

That last part is something I really love about State College.

Locals support locals here.

When somebody opens a genuinely good restaurant, bar, shop or business, word travels. People tell their friends. They bring their families. They keep going back. Some places develop almost cult-like local followings, and everybody seems to have their own opinion about which place does something best.

And Downtown’s personality changes constantly.

A Friday night before a home football game can feel like controlled chaos.

Saturday can feel like the entire world somehow decided to descend on one little town in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Then Sunday morning comes around and suddenly everybody is at brunch, dissecting the game from the night before and recovering together.

Give it another day or two and Downtown can be completely calm again.

Summer might be my favorite version of it. The student population thins out, traffic settles down, the patios belong to the locals again and everything just feels relaxed. You can wander Downtown, grab dinner, have a drink outside and somehow forget that one of the largest universities in the country is sitting a few blocks away.

Then fall comes and the whole machine starts back up.

That’s one of the things I think makes living here fun: State College never really has one personality.

You learn its rhythms.

You know when town is about to be packed. You know when everyone is about to disappear. You know which weekends require reservations and which nights you can decide at 6:30 that you want dinner Downtown and just go.

And after enough years, all of those different versions of Downtown start feeling like home.

I’m curious what other locals think:

What’s your favorite version of Downtown State College — football season, summer, Arts Fest, a random quiet weeknight, or something else?