BLESSED WITH DENSITY

WITH MORE PEOPLE, YOU GET . . . MORE

Though they arrived in St. George too late, real estate bubble-wise, to find many takers for their "It's the next Hoboken!" fantasy, the developer crowd now marketing St. George/Tompkinsville as 'Downtown Staten Island' has gotten one thing right, in my opinion:

A walkable New York City neighborhood located 1/2 hour from downtown Manhattan can support greater density.

What kind of density, in what form, and where, are all valid questions, but out of the question for the purposes of this post. My point here is straightforward: with more people come more of everything. Including more offbeat, crazy or eccentric events, experiences, and people. That's why I live in a city. The city.

It's not that slightly weird stuff doesn't happen everywhere; it's simply that more of it happens where there are more people to make it happen. As, for example:

A CLOWN IN
THE DRIVER'S SEAT

Good thing my neighbor and friend Marc Zimetbaum had his digital camera at the ready when he spied this Clown-in-a-Car, sitting in the driver's seat on St. Marks Place in St. George, outside the Curtis High School gate.

Turns out he was just killing time prior to a scheduled appearance at a children's birthday party across the street at Castleton Park apartments. The unidentified man put on a particularly winning smile for Marc's camera.

But wait. There's more:

TALE OF A TEPEE

A few days later, my friend Steve Nutt, a potter and fiber artist from Ward Hill, was riding his bike through St. George. 

He was proceeding northwest on St. Marks, approaching Hamilton Avenue--about a half block from the location where my friend Marc spotted the Clown-in-a-Car just a few days before.

As Steve approached the corner, he saw the conical object at right out of the corner of his eye. Luckily for me, he had brought his camera along, just in case.

Thanks, Steve and Marc, for documenting two of the loonier aspects of two representative days in the life of St. George, which would not have been complete without clown and tepee.

Comments

[Robin Locke Monda]

But wait. I live a half block from this tepee. It looks like the real deal. Why is it there? Can we send a smoke signaled inquiry? And let's not forget that Tattfoo Tan has a customized tepee he built right in his studio/living room, for his wife, Enze. It isn't visible from the street, but there are photos of it on his site here: http://www.tattfoo.com/projects.html