The State College Borough Council recently passed legislation requiring downtown businesses to close their vendor windows at midnight in an effort to prevent any more downtown riots.

The only business the measure affected was Acme Pizza, 200 E. Beaver Ave., and at midnight last Friday the business was closed and remained that way as the mini-riot broke out after the Penn State-Temple basketball game.

So if they couldn't get pizza from Acme, why were students there? Could it be that this area on Beaver Avenue, affectionately termed Beaver Canyon, is just a popular place to hang out with or without Acme?

Although the borough council denies it was targeting Acme Pizza through this measure, it is the only business that operates out of a vendor window after midnight downtown.

And from what most of us students know about the detailed operations of Acme — not much, that is — the late hours of the evening and early morning hours are the only business hours for the pizza vendor.

From the disturbance last weekend, it should be painfully clear that students gather on Beaver Avenue near Acme Pizza because it is a convenient spot — in between many large apartment buildings, fraternities and bars, which is where most students go on the weekends. Prior to its opening, the owners of Acme probably reacted to the crowds that they observed there weekend after weekend. It's not the other way around, as the borough would have us believe, where crowds formed just because someone was selling pizza out of a store window.

Granted, the fact that drunken students are hungry and they can conveniently buy cheap pizza doesn't exactly diminish crowd sizes. However, neither do three large apartment buildings and a fraternity sitting on the four corners of the same intersection of Beaver Avenue and Locust Lane.

If anything, Acme's window would be most conducive to keeping the crowd moving. But now that the borough is making Acme close its service window, crowds that do congregate while waiting for food will stand around for an even longer time for service at other eateries.

Coincidentally, Acme owners have recently announced they could be relocating the store.

The question then is, who will move into the Acme's vacated storefront? No other business is going to want to take over the basement of a fraternity in an area that has seen its fair share of riots.

What is most deplorable about the council's action is that it goes against many council members concerns about downtown vitality.

The council has said it wants to keep businesses downtown, to maintain interest, traffic and development.

But demanding that one single downtown business close down during its peak hours of operation contradicts that.

Acme was the perfect business at a location few would want.

Now the borough has one less eatery open late hours, and students will still congregate on the street anyway. Just think back to the debacle Saturday morning.