Brick streets and banners in Spanish Street rendering

   Former Mayor Len Weeks' quest for ways to improve the streetscape along Spanish and Hypolita streets where he plans improvements to property he owns will unfold in a city-sponsored public meeting Thursday at 6 pm in the Alcazar Room at City Hall.

   The city is looking for improvements like streetscape and drainage for Spanish, Hypolita, and Treasury streets. Businessmen like Weeks are looking for more inviting pedestrian ways. Their wish may include a Business Improvement District, a defined area within which businesses pay an additional tax or fee to fund projects within the district.

   City officials want public input on proposed work and options for funding. Marquis Halback developed streetscape ideas for Weeks including brick surfaces, more trees and benches, even a pocket park at Hypolita and Spanish streets.

   Beautification of streets around St. George, to expand pedestrian areas and commercial opportunities, was proposed throughout former Mayor George Gardner's terms in office (2002-2006), even getting $25,000 set aside for improvements. But the only success was coquina paving of Hypolita from Avenida Menendez to St. George, courtesy of boat show promoters who paid to tear up that section to lay a water line to the bayfront.

Artbreakers 2013 Festival logo

Changing of the Guard

Artbreakers' Auld City Gaelic Festival, City of St. Augustine's 450 Years of the African American Experience, St. Augustine Lighthouse's Sea Your History Weekends, Flagler College's Race in the South: SA in Context, and the Florida Heritage Book Festival's Festival and Writers Conference were biggest winners in the county bed tax competition for $550,000 in funding.

Performer ban increased 

St. George Players perform off-street at Spanish Bakery

An intelligible licensing regimen, a reasonable license fee, clear rules for performers, and designated busking spots (where buskers make their 'pitches'): These seem the four components of an acceptable accommodation in communities that have had long experience with this phenomenon.

No matter how highly structured the community's licensing system however, certain local constituencies will inevitably continue to resist and resent the presence of these scions of the errant minstrels who filled the streets of Europe during both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

We know they played period instruments, sang and juggled. I wonder how talented they were. I'd bet some of them were really bad! I bet, too, that they were a constant source of excruciating annoyance to the mainstream peddlers and shopkeepers who paid a fee to the local feudal lord [that portended the property tax]....

Of course, the problem wouldn't exist were it not for the cattle chute and gauntlet configuration of St George Street and its tributaries. No such issues would seem of concern to the people of Boston and Paris, where legions of buskers ply their craft in the wide open spaces of Faneuil Hall and the Champs Elysees.

We seem unable to figure out exactly how to reconcile problems caused by the physical configuration of our pedestrian walkways with reasonable demands for a more accepting attitude toward artists, musicians, and other buskers. That said, I must say I'm neither smart enough nor wise enough to offer specific solutions that would please most and certainly not all.

2 years, 1 month, 23 days to St. Augustine's 450th anniversary