Editor’s note: Thomas Sullivan’s writing has appeared in Word Riot and 3AM Magazine, among others. He is the author of Life In The Slow Lane, a comic memoir about teaching drivers education. For information on this title, please visit his author website at http://thomassullivanhumor.com.
by Thomas Sullivan
A few years ago I was driving in Oakland with a friend that I was visiting for the weekend. We were puttering through downtown, dodging potholes as we looked for a place to park, when I noticed something odd. All of the parking meters were covered with yellow nylon bags that were cinched to the poles with plastic twist-ties. Each meter had a pole covered by a bag, but no head into which drivers inserted their coins (this was prior to the advent of modern, debit-card reading machines). So I asked my friend Ron about this.
“Oh yeah,” he said with a laugh, “the city ran this program to provide inner-city youth with job skills. Among other things, they taught people to be welders. So, they think a few guys in the program used blowtorches to burn off the meter heads. I guess they took ‘em home and cracked them open for the change.”
Ron smiled and said, “Pretty sweet, now you don’t have to pay to park. Those guys did us a favor.”
As a former disgruntled collector of expensive parking tickets, I had to agree. As we got out of the car it occurred to me that this is exactly how public investment is supposed to work – the benefits should be spread among as many people as possible.
* * * *
In the ensuing years I doubted I’d find a better example of public investment gone awry in such an amusing way. There were the usual stories of mega-banks and insurance conglomerates using their political connections and the public’s money to survive and then profit handsomely from their screw-ups. But those stories were always depressing and involved millions of innocent victims, many of whom will be affected financially and emotionally for years. The tales were in no way entertaining, which is an important side-benefit of public investment, especially when something goes wrong.
But the other day an incident at Monument Island changed everything and restored my hope. Monument Island is a man-made land mass that sits next to a causeway in a bay just outside of Miami. It has a public park that, over the years, had degraded into a makeshift site for illicit drinking and loud parties. For many voters in Miami-Dade County this was an affront to the island’s original purpose, which was to serve as a monument celebrating Henry Flagler. Flagler was a wealthy railroad and real-estate developer responsible for much of the early development in southeast Florida (until recently, it seems that developers in Florida were considered prime candidates for hero status. Ironically, Flagler fell down a flight of marble stairs at a hotel built for the gilded age uber-wealthy and died shortly thereafter). So, to remedy the situation voters approved a one million dollar bond and then restored the island.
But the other day a new set of adventurers made landfall at Monument Island. The small group wasn’t pursuing wealth, however, they were after art. They set up their cameras and proceeded to shoot a porno in the shadow of a 110-foot obelisk, built to honor Flagler’s “achievements.” And they did this without any of the generous tax breaks that cities like Seattle offer to attract Hollywood film crews.
Not surprisingly, many people in Miami found the whole episode hard to swallow. But their legal options were limited – public exposure is a crime in Florida, but only if someone witnesses it. Which no one did in this case, despite the straight-to-internet film being shot in the middle of the day. The folks who filmed Island Adventure appeared to be off the hook.
Which leads to the obvious conclusion that the bar for public art has now been raised, which will undoubtedly spur the inevitable conservative backlash. We’ve moved well beyond the petty battles over Robert Mapplethorpe’s arresting photos appearing in public galleries. We’re taking it outside, removing our clothes, and becoming the art ourselves. And the only way to top Island Adventure will be for someone to film a shag-movie in broad daylight at the base of the Washington Monument in D.C., with extra points accruing to anyone that films during an ultra-conservative, “we want our country back” type of rally.
