South Street Shuffle

Meanwhile, an American freedom - freedom of expression - is being undermined a few blocks from the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

South Street Seaport, a corporate outdoor marketplace that uses part of an old nineteenth-century port on the East River in Manhattan and shares space with a maritime museum, features street performers in the spring, summer and early autumn months. They have mimes, musicians, magicians, balloon artists, and puppeteers, among others. Anyway, although the Seaport is a private enterprise and auditions and regulates the entertainers that work on its property, it doesn't pay these people anything - like any other street performers, they have to rely on money from the people who watch them. But at least these performers have never had to pay a fee to perform at the Seaport - but that is exactly what the South Street Seaport marketplace's management (the museum has nothing to do with the marketplace part of the complex) is proposing for the 2004 season. An exact dollar amount hasn't been settled on yet (at least not to my knowledge), but it will likely be too expensive for the Seaport's entertainers, who rely on this gig for their livelihoods, to afford.

I love street performers - good, bad, in between. I also believe that they have a right to perform on the street and entertain people. The Seaport actually controls a car-free part of Fulton Street, a public thoroughfare, yet it wants to charge its entertainers for the right to work there. This is an unfair and un-American assault on freedom of expression. This odious fee should be rescinded. Street entertainers in New York have been harassed enough by city authorities; they should not be subjected to this blatant unfairness.

Want to write to the Seaport and tell them to let their entertainers perform without paying a fee? Contact Joan Cooney at South Street Seaport Management, 19 Fulton Street, New York, N.Y. 10038. Do it soon. I did. :-)