Friday was the first night with the new 10p – 4a Washington Avenue curfew for any one under 21 and none of the clubs were shot up last weekend (but at this point, who can tell?), so it’s going pretty well so far.
St. Louis police turned to a “festival” permit to give them authority to bar anyone under age 21 from the entertainment district along Washington Avenue after 10 pm on Friday and Saturday this weekend.
Good play by the STLPD. We always pretty much considered Washington Avenue on the weekends to be a “Douchebag Festival” anyway, so that permit loophole actually makes a lot of sense.
Some business managers worried the barricades would hurt their business particularly valet parking.
St. Louis Police Lt. Dan Zarrick said he realized the valet parkers were making some of the greatest sacrifices as police fine tuned their approach to controlling underage activity on the street.
“Plus those valet parking guys are just little red sport coat-ed targets running around at night, so we figure there’s one less target on the street this way too. We’re trying to keep the streets safe by keeping a few appealing targets off the street as possible: annoying minors, and valets were first, and next we’re going to ban foil t-shirts with wings and skull designs.” Zarrick continued (not really).
Reaction to the new curfew from the neighborhood residents was surprisingly mixed.
“I hope that it is temporary,” said one long time downtown resident, “but it seems like a poorly laid effort to fix the problem. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the problem,” he complained.
All they’ve done is block minors from visiting an area full of bars for 6 hours, so we’re not sure what the big deal is. Plus, you start complaining that you can’t get minors to your place between 10p and 4a on the weekends and people might start asking questions about your blacked-out van full of wine, candy bars, stuffed animals and handcuffs, so we’d watch it with the interviews there whiny guy.
You know what they should do next? Do an old person curfew too! …not because their dangerous, but just because we’re you stumbling around after having a good night and you might have like one ball popping out of your shorts because tucking and zipping is crazy hard some times, the last thing you want to look up and see is one of those old guy head shakes of disapproval. Few things are worse than an old person head shake of disapproval. Maybe they should just put a big old guy bobblehead down on Washington and see what that does to the crime rate.
Just make sure it doesn’t look like Larry Rice or you’ll just have a bunch of homeless guys sleeping at it feet while everyone else ignores it.
photo via STLToday