Could Pensacola be as cool as Austin?

Having recently returned from the Texas capital, I saw glimmers of what our fair city could become, on a smaller scale.

I have a hard time imagining the future market for “Keep Pensacola Weird” T-shirts, though we certainly have our fair share of weird to share with the universe.

Could we make an event out of watching a colony of 1 million Mexican free-tailed bats leave their roost under the South Congress Bridge to hunt as Austinites have?

Not if our only fun with wildlife is throwing dead mullet at the Flora-Bama Lounge & Package. At least the bats are eating mosquitoes, doing a solid for the humans they share the city with.

Dead mullet in the sun do no one any favors after an hour or two.

And all of Austin’s eggs aren’t in one basket. It strives to make the nooks and crannies of many neighborhoods — not just those off South Congress Street —  livable, inviting and bustling. People walk there. They bike places. They have parks and theaters, a bar district not far from the capitol and residential areas nestled amid all of that.

And Austin embraces the weird.

People living just off South Congress Street tolerate the issues of living in the hipster capital of Texas because they have found the perks are worth it.

As we build Pensacola’s brand, it is healthy and helpful to keep this in mind.

Which why I found the recent “Thursday night downtown crime” thread instructive on this point.

Earlier this summer, downtown residents -- and Pensacola Police -- noticed that crowds picked up along Jefferson Street and north of Government Street, especially after the clubs closed about 3 or 4 a.m.

“We were experiencing some burglaries and fights and we wanted to get a handle on it before it got out of hand,” said Police Chief Chip Simmons.

Simmons and Mayor Ashton Hayward met with George Overby, owner of the building that houses the bottle club on Intendencia at Jefferson, and the Mitchells, owners of Seville Quarter.

Both clubs hire off-duty PPD officers for security, but the crowds, Simmons said, were starting to take beat officers away from their duties in other areas of the city.

“Everyone in the room wanted downtown to be a place we can come to in a safe environment,” Simmons said. “Everyone.”

City spokeswoman Tamara Fountain also stressed the meeting was not adversarial. And that in many cases, the crowds causing concern were not patrons necessarily of either club, but folks hanging out in nearby parking lots setting up their own party scene.

Or making their own forms of mischief -- criminal and otherwise.

“There is no ordinance against hanging out on private property unless the private property owners posts notice that you can’t do that,” Fountain said. “Those property owners need to let us know that it is OK to tell people get off those properties.”

But having business owners install good lighting, for example, in some of those parking lots, can be a contribution from the private sector toward the solution as well.

So, Simmons said, Overby said he would tell the bottle club proprietors to shutdown the late-night Thursday hours.

And they did.

Now, says at least one downtown resident, the difference is noticeable. WEAR-TV3 meteorologist Allen Strum, who used his iPhone in mid-June to shoot video of a would-be car burglar that he shared with PPD (who caught the suspect), said via email in late July, “already it’s better from my perspective.”

The collective we could have freaked out on this point. But, lo and behold, this time, cooler heads prevailed.

“Some people think crowds are bad,” said Chief Simmons. “During the proper time, crowds are great. When I’m trying to sleep, crowds are not so great.”

“It’s an issue we didn’t have to deal with 10 years ago,” Simmons said. “Ten years ago people were begging for crowds to be downtown, and nowadays because there’s so much momentum downtown, you just want to make sure that the growth is taking place in the right places and the right way.”

Supporting more residential and mixed use development in downtown — and making that coexist with building a downtown as a place to work and play — is a delicate balance.

“As more businesses come downtown, there probably do need to be some rules there,” Simmons said.

Striking that balance means making downtown and her adjacent neighborhoods livable not just for swinging singles but for professionals, young families and people who have called these areas home for longer than than it has been fashionable to live there.

As Pensacola grows, it needs to keep a cool head, because there will be problems. With a cool head, we can keep our weird quotient at just the right level.

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