Easy Street

You've heard the phrase "living on Easy Street", but maybe you didn't know where to find it. Now it can be told: it's in Port Charlotte, FL. (And if you were looking for someone to tell you how to get to Sesame Street, it's in Opa-Locka.)

I hope you appreciate this picture, because as I was taking it, I looked down to see a huge black snake - probably a black racer - wrigglng beside my foot. If you were driving on the Tamiami last week and saw some guy in a fedora leap six feet in the air for seemingly no visible reason, yeah, that was me.

Opa-Locka

Back in the good old days, when a man woke up in the morning and decided he wanted to design and build a town, he just up and did it. And if he wanted to lay it all out in a faux-Middle-Eastern architectural theme, hey, why not? Aviator Glenn Curtiss designed and developed the city of Opa-Locka and based it on a One Thousand and One Nights motif, to the extent that even the streets that have names like Sabur Lane, Sultan Avenue, Ali Baba Avenue, Perviz Avenue and - yes - Sesame Street. (The city's name is an abbreviation of a Seminole place name, Opa-tisha-wocka-locka, which sounded too Klishama Klingo to be true, but I checked and it's apparently legit.)

Opa-locka has the largest collection of Moorish Revival architecture in the Western hemisphere, but unfortunately it boasts a sadder statistic as well: in 2004 Opa-locka had the highest rate of violent crime for any city in the United States. Any city. Even Detroit. Pittsburgh. Oakland. Milwaukee. How is this possible? I dunno, man, go ask them. I'm just filing a report here.