‘Punx’ Shake Up Old Town Eureka

Wearing plaid “jammies” and black leather and sporting striped green hair, the young people who converge on Old Town here have brought a touch of color and some controversy to this conservative seaside city.

They mostly want to sip coffee and hang out, but some shop owners and city leaders are bothered by this invasion of twentysomethings, wondering if they are yet another threat to business in recession-prone Humboldt County.

Some of the young people call themselves Art Punx, although many more prefer to remain unclassified. A recent punx meeting, held in an old art studio, attracted about 50 people--including an old drunk who stumbled in by mistake.

“We’re just trying to find a place to go . . . where there’s no place to be,” said Brandon Bay, 23, an unofficial leader of the group.

Bay is trying to get his peers together, hoping that they can raise money or press city and business leaders to create a center or concert hall for young people.

Old Town has seen little of the city’s youths since the Eureka City Council banned skateboarding about six years ago. But now teen-agers and young adults have come back--many carrying skateboards, wearing the flannel, pajama-like jammies and other unconventional clothing, and cultivating unusual hairstyles.

They’re hard to label. But whatever they are, these punx aren’t a gang, police say. They don’t deal drugs on the street. They don’t carry weapons--except for the occasional spray can.

Some of the punxsters are local college students. Others have jobs. Most seem to have a lot of leisure time on their hands.

“Eureka is full of weight rooms and baseball diamonds,” complained 19-year-old Solomon Schecter, drinking coffee outside an Old Town shop. “But when it comes to culture and music, there’s just nothing.”

The only nightclub in Eureka to focus on youthful “alternative” music switched to a country audience late last year.

Many punx say the loss of the nightclub is another example of anti-youth prejudice in the Eureka area. Some express their frustrations through anti-Establishment and feminist graffiti, sprayed on sidewalks and in alleys around downtown and Old Town Eureka.

“Drrty Girls Are Proud of It! Your Approval Is Worthless!” reads one alley writing.

Others say they just want to be a part of the community, neither stared at nor avoided.

“We’re just people,” Schecter said. “Lately, my friends are getting more and more depressed. Most can’t find work and not many have cars.”

One flash point in relations between the punx and the Old Town merchants occurred recently when a coffeehouse owner put tables and chairs on the sidewalk in front of his store.

It was a perfect spot for the cigarette-smoking, coffee-drinking, chess-playing Eureka youths, and they came in swarms. Perfect, that is, until John Hall decided that other businesses were being hurt by the horde of bodies outside his door.

“I had other merchants call me and complain, saying they had to escort customers to their cars because they didn’t want to walk through the kids,” Hall said.

In response to the concerns, Hall sponsored several community meetings between punx and merchants. The meetings were well-attended but may not have settled any issues. Hall now discourages large groups from hanging out at his coffeehouse.

“If we reached one or two people, it was a positive thing,” said Jody Rosconi, owner of Graystone Jewelers and one of the Old Town merchants who would prefer the punx congregate elsewhere.

“I’ve had my building spray-painted,” Rosconi said. “I’ve had a skateboard run up the front of my sports car.

“I was a student in the ‘60s, and at first I thought, ‘This is just what the youth of today is going through.’ But I do not remember damaging other people’s property.”

Rosconi recently removed a large graffiti patch from her building, at a cost of several hundred dollars.

“I have to say it was a very good-looking graphic,” she admitted. “But the placement . . . on the cornerstone of a retail store?”

There are others in the community who see this new interest in Old Town as a chance for Eureka to make up for past wrongs.

“In most communities, the youth abandon the downtown,” said Jay Turner, executive director of the Main Street Program. The publicly funded program is designed to economically revitalize Eureka.

“There is a direct correlation: If you hate the downtown at 18, you’ll hate it at 35,” Turner said. “And that’s not good for business.”

Turner had words of caution to those who want to run the kids out or blame them for all the problems in Old Town.

“We have to be very careful to not stereotype here,” he said, referring to complaints about skateboarding and graffiti. “A community that abandons its youth has done something wrong.”