In performing the beautiful Steven Sondheim song, Judy Collins sings:
But where are the clowns
Send in the clowns
Don’t bother they’re here …
This year we celebrated our 30th consecutive spring of coming to Clearwater, Florida to catch a break from the daily grind, and for the past nearly 20 years spending the month of March on Clearwater Beach. More recently, however, clowns have been showing up on the beach, particularly in the late afternoon and into the night. Not likely the clowns that Sondheim had in mind, these clowns are more like a subset of the Insane Clown Posse. This year, the undesirable clowns in question have been part of a day-tripping contingent looking for trouble, as Clearwater Police Chief Daniel Slaughter addresses:
In referring to use of technology and increased police presence on the Beach, Chief Slaughter opines: “That will serve as a deterrent effect to any of these clowns that want to come out and do any of this ridiculous behavior.” The town and local businesses realize that the clown contingent adds little if anything to local commerce and resources and, if left unchecked, will serve as a deterrent to Phillies fans attending spring training games from spending more time in and around the beach area.
It was a rough spring break for several Florida beach areas this March, perhaps nowhere more acutely than in Miami Beach. The Mayor and his Commission were so fed up with the rowdy crowd and shootings this year that they passed a resolution imposing curfews a year in advance for 2024. The Mayor added: ““We are doing everything we can to tell the world we don’t want you here”. Evidently “we” are the law abiding citizens, and “you” are the clowns hell-bent in disrupting the quality of life normally enjoyed by residents or non-clown visitors. As Patricia Mazzei reported in he New York Times, “Miami Beach Wants to Tame Spring Break for Good“.
Fed up with the behaviors and actions of the unruly crowds, Miami Beach Police streamed through the beach area on ATVs confiscating booze and drugs. Apparently, the phrase “turn the other cheek” in the New Testament was never intended to encompass twerking.
The condo which we rented for the month is close to the roundabout that divides the North from the South Side of Mandalay Avenue on Clearwater Beach. The South Side is the location of where the Surf Style shooting took place that Chief Slaughter addressed above. It is an area in transition that has progressively seen paradise paved and parking lots put up. These public lots invites day-trippers to hang out on and around Pier 60. The North Side where we stay for the month has one major lot pictured below. It has had the effect of drawing day-trippers to the North Side. Some of the area merchants who we’ve gotten to know through the years have voiced concern about the clientele that these parking garages invite.
This year the noise “on the strip” at normal bedtime hours, around 11 PM, was louder than in years past. While police presence increased on and around the beach in the late afternoon, it was nowhere to be found in the late evening. At a Clearwater budget council meeting in the middle of March, the Mayor abruptly resigned. In an interview given the following day, he cited reckless budget priorities on the part of the town council and one of the areas which he indicated was insufficiently funded was the Police Department.
This of course is antithetical to calls for “de-funding the police”, yet as we have seen in the town of our primary residence, increased police presence has been necessary to deter so-called pop-up parties. It is a well-recognized phenomenon at the Jersey Shore, as I blogged about last year. Our mayor, Paul Kanitra, didn’t refer to the organizers of summer pop-up parties soliciting day-tripping youths to come to the Shore as clowns. He referred to them as idiots. His bold stance in setting up deterrents to trashing our town has earned him widespread approbation to the point where he recently garnered the GOP nomination to run for State Assembly. I can only hope that his successor will be as firm on measures taken to deter day-trippers with bad intent.
While we have valued our March mini-sabbaticals on Clearwater Beach, and we know the area well enough to minimize exposure to day-trippers with bad intent, our minds are wide open. We prefer to stay exactly in the area we are, although we have good friends who have gravitated to Dunedin, a nearby town with less congestion and within easy reach of Bay Care Ballpark where the Phillies spend spring (and devoid of day-trippers with bad intent). But hope springs eternal that civility will return to Clearwater Beach, and that what we witnessed this year in the evening hours is not a “new normal”.
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