There's a hell of a lot happening in downtown St. Pete on this particular Friday night. There's the public block party that takes over Central Avenue on the first weekend evening of every month. There's the Honda Grand Prix. There's even a free concert at Jannus Landing, headlined by veteran blues 'n' boogie combo The Fabulous Thunderbirds. As a result, there are thousands more people in the area than you'd find on any other Friday night, crowding the sidewalks and crosswalks, turning the wrong way down one-way streets, and generally making the search for a parking place – particularly in the packed, noisy, fume-filled garage adjacent to the BayWalk shopping plaza – a singularly purgatorial experience.
About the only place not overrun with warm bodies is BayWalk itself. There are people here, of course, moving to and from the movie theater and shops, partying upstairs at open-air frozen-drink bar Wet Willie's, loitering in small packs on the bricks of the courtyard that's half quaint Mediterranean bazaar, half tacky Busch Gardens facade. But compared to past First Fridays, BayWalk seems pretty empty.
By and large, the kids aren't here.
In recent years, massive throngs of up to 1,500 teenagers have made the plaza the site of their own First Friday mixer, and there's occasionally been trouble.
Trouble, more trouble, is something BayWalk desperately wants to avoid.
Following the arrest of an African-American member of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement in October of 2003 for allegedly interfering with the arrest of another black man and inciting a riot, the Uhurus spent about a year picketing the shopping plaza and publicly denouncing its security enforcement policy as racist. During that time, a 16-year-old black male was banned from the plaza after being accused of passing drugs to a young female, a small incident that made a big splash in the community, given the situation. (The kid said what he passed was his phone number.)
Eventually, BayWalk's management made a city-brokered deal with the Uhurus, removing "anti-gang" dress-code bans that closely resembled racial profiling – cocked caps, pulled-up pant legs, excessive bling – from its security policy. The headlines went away, but more and more kids came, loitering, flirting and generally making older folks uncomfortable. And in January of this year, a catfight between two 13-year-old girls catalyzed a free-for-all that took hours, and 14 arrests, to quell.
Tonight is First Friday in more than the usual sense. A new, stricter BayWalk curfew policy is kicking in. After 9 p.m., anyone under 21 who's on the balcony, where the bars are, must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian; after 10 p.m., anyone under 18, anywhere in the complex, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian "if not going to or from a place of business." The curfew is obviously designed to eliminate aimless high school socializing, and resembles others enforced at malls and other businesses across the country. This ain't Ybor City, a public neighborhood, and any complaints that the curfew will just push the problem somewhere else are essentially moot – BayWalk is private property, and the owners make the rules.
There have been signs announcing the new curfew in the courtyard for weeks. Word has gone out, and it seems the kids would rather find somewhere else to do nothing than foment civil disobedience; at 10 o'clock, as Wet Willie's starts charging a cover and an impressive display of police and private security officers gathers at the center of the courtyard to go over the game plan, there are only a few small gaggles of teens "not going to or from a place of business." The uniformed men and women, interdenominational ministers who've roamed the place on Fridays since the big fight, and tan t-shirted members of volunteer organization the Community Awareness and Response Team actually outnumber those under 18 at this point.
Nevertheless, after a brief confab, the police and security guards approach two small groups of black male teenagers and one pair of microskirted white girls, handing out copies of the new policy and outlining the situation. There's lots of eye-rolling, and more than a little exasperated arm-flailing, from the kids, but there's no menace – the gestures clearly say "This is ridiculous, and I want you to explain it to me," rather than "Fuck you, authority figure." Most of the teens saunter slowly and moodily toward the courtyard's eastern exit, where they gather with others who've been ousted and bitch amongst themselves. They actually leave the courtyard only when the cops start heading in their direction.
Those of drinking age line up to ascend the wide central staircase, drink alcoholic Slurpees and listen to really bad music. The ministers continue to circulate, while the Community Awareness and Response Team representatives, mostly older African-American men, lounge watchfully on some benches. CART is a sort of liaison between the streets and the city officials, a group of volunteers and city employees whose ear-to-the-ground position in the community allows it to detect, and hopefully defuse, tensions between those who run the city and those who live in it.
"We do rumor control," says retired high school principal Charley Williams, who helped found CART after a 1996 conflict between police and South Side residents over the shooting of a young black man became national news. "We're proactive, we're here to keep things from happening. [CART is] mostly people who come from the Midtown district, who know the kids. They'll listen to us."
Williams doesn't claim a specific opinion regarding the curfew itself, but thinks the most recent youth-oriented melee at BayWalk was basically about a few bad apples.
"I think the kids have been pretty good," he says. "That was an isolated incident. Those kids, they'd fight wherever they met. They'd fight in church."
SCOTT.HARRELL@WEEKLYPLANET.COM
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2005.