Steele Smith heads for the border
DOWNTOWN — After nearly five years of working the Third Street Promenade, the keeper of Santa Monica’s street performers is packing up and heading south.
Steele Smith, 42, whose official title is “venue manager” for downtown, will step down from his post at the end of the month. He leaves behind a system of coordinating street performers on the Promenade that has become practically self-supporting.
Street performers — including musicians, artists and public speakers, among others — must apply for a $37 permit from City Hall in order to work on the Promenade. Beyond that, the main rule for performers is that they move at least 120 feet every two hours. It’s a system that, thanks to extensive planning and Smith’s daily monitoring, runs practically by itself.
Because the Promenade has so many visitors each day, it attracts a wide array of performers — everything from skilled blues musicians to magicians, artists and a mini Elvis. But that doesn’t mean a few oddballs haven’t tested the system now and again, Smith said. One person wondered why they couldn’t lie down in a box filled with glass. Another wanted to juggle bowling balls on the Promenade.
Smith said the reward has been seeing performers, merchants, free speech activists and people who experience the outdoor mall like a park use the Promenade cooperatively.
“When it all works together like that, it really is amazing and a lot of fun,” said Smith, a local resident who makes $42,000 a year working for the Bayside District Corp., a nonprofit organization that runs downtown with City Hall.
Smith, who got into the business after working as a court reporter and getting to know the city attorney and other local political players, seemed a good match for the job, which required he deal regularly with the street performers but also report back to the Bayside board of directors and other bureaucrats.
“I was a good mix,” Smith said last week. “Both my parents are artists. I had long hair. Yet I knew all the cops, the municipal issues. I had a foot in both worlds.”
Before he came on scene, musicians and other performers downtown would stake out certain areas and stay put all day. And because anyone with $37 can get a permit to perform, the less-skilled performers were causing some problems, Smith said.
“It was essentially a free-for-all in 1999, and that first year was intense,” said Smith, who at first had to physically move performers to break the old patterns they’d grown used to. “We cannot control the quality of what we have. You can see if you’re a merchant with a limited view corridor, looking at the same performer all day — you’d go nutty.”
Nearly 1,000 people got permits from City Hall to perform last year. But on an average weekend night, about 22 will perform, said Smith, who often makes his rounds during that time.
No one has been hired to replace Smith — police officers will monitor the Promenade in the interim, Smith said.
Asked what it was like to work with Smith, street performers said Smith has developed a relationship that won’t easily be replaced. The performers said for the most part they rotate by themselves according to the rules, but added that it’s helpful to have Smith around.
“He’s really our only liaison,” said Kiko Montecillo, 28, who’s been playing the keyboard on the Promenade for three years. “There are times when he’s really stepped up and been able to do that... But with nobody here to enforce the rules, (some of the performers) will just sort of set up and stay in the same place for a long time.”
City Councilman Kevin McKeown said he was proud of the system Smith helped put in place.
“Santa Monica’s made a conscious effort to sustain an organic community of creative street artists, providing the Promenade with a vitality you can’t get with predictable, booked acts,” he said. “By rotating performance spaces and encouraging cooperation rather than enforcement, we’ve matched that vitality with a good vibe.”
Once he finishes up at Bayside at the end of the month, Smith isn’t planning on sticking around. He and his girlfriend intend to move just a day or two later to the small town of Todos Santos on the tip of Baja Calif., where they’ll help Smith’s mother manage a handful of rental properties she owns.
“Sometimes you realize — life is short, you’ve got to take advantage of those opportunities,” Smith said. “It all happened so quick. It’s scary, but what the hell.”
“Sometimes you realize — life is short, you’ve got to take advantage of those opportunities.” — — STEELE SMITH Venue manager, Bayside District Corp
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 20, 2004. Read the original PDF.