by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
Philip Ramsey is something of an elusive character. When EU decided to do a piece about the Tangerine Festival, an annual event in Riverside’s Memorial Park, I went to Google first and found that there is this person in Jacksonville named Philip Ramsey. I don’t know much about him, but the Parks Department and Urban Jacksonville both mention him as the coordinator of the Tangerine Festival. He is apparently also interested in starting a public vegetable garden in one or some of the parks in Jacksonville. Otherwise, I found a transcript of some sort of city meeting or trial, wherein he commended a committee that set boat speed regulations.
I know he is denoted as “having ties with Uncommon Grounds Coffeehouse in San Marco,” a personal favorite coffee shop in town, and he apparently organizes the festival. But its all real secret. I mean, I had no trouble learning about the festival, there were posters and flyers all over town, but there is no official word on who put the thing together or why. Even their Myspace page (mayspace.com/tangerinefestjax) contained almost no explanatory text. So I had to take on this story the way a reporter at wits end is always forced to, I had to attend the event.
Fortunately I live in Riverside, so attending said event was not too difficult. When I first got there, with my wife, two kids, and a niece in tow, an orange, plywood arrow placed on the ground directed us into Memorial Park. Memorial Park is usually fairly empty, except for a few bamboo pole fishermen along the water and maybe a red-nosed homeless person dragging a foot down the walkway and panhandling. At night, the park used to be downright scary. But today, as we broke free of the trees and could take in the whole scene, Memorial Park was flush with people engaged in activities.
From 10 am until 10 pm (with a few brief breaks for rain) people made their way through the park, stopped and chatted with friends, took some time on a blanket to chill and talk and maybe even engaged in some Frisbee or Hula Hooping. There are so many outlets for creativity that people of all ages could find something to keep them busy. On one end of the park there might be a group of bohemian kids sitting around a free food table and drinking beer, while just twenty feet behind them there is a small stage with a solo acoustic act performing for an intimate circle of kids.
Young parents were there with their children drawing murals on the sidewalks with the provided sidewalk chalk, and some of the more financially stable Riversiders were browsing the selection of ceramics and handcrafted jewelry at the stands. There was even a booth doing tune-ups for bicyclists, proving that there are some people in Jacksonville participating in the national movement to reduce car use and encourage pedal power, even deep in the “red” south.
The Tangerine Festival is a great example of how neighborhoods can pull themselves together by cultivating their shared interests and voluntarily coming together in a public place. This event was not sponsored by any of the businesses in the Riverside area, but rather planned and executed by people in the community. The fact that I couldn’t really get to the bottom of who this Philip Ramsey is just made the whole event feel more authentic.
In this day and age, most of the communities we hear about are online communities and most of the chatting we do is text messaging, but in Memorial Park on Saturday, Riverside was about a community of real people interacting in the most ideal fashion, running into each other in our public parks. The businesses in Five Points, whether they know it or not, benefited a great deal from the event. Since there wasn’t much in the park in the way of meals and alcohol, patrons of the event took a break to wander over to Five Points (or Faux Points if they just wanted a quick sixer from Publix) to purchase some beer and vittles. So the event was productive for local businesses, healthy and engaging for participants, and an amazing advertisement for what is great about Riverside.
There was the sidewalk chalk, the canvases and paints where patrons were invited to paint something, and people out collecting signatures for the Jax Greenhouse Alliance. For quite some time I have been interested in doing a piece about those people that entertain themselves with politics and activism, but never have they seemed more compelling to me than when I found myself at the Tangerine Festival listening to Chad Matheny, from Jax Greenhouse Alliance discuss cheap solutions to environmental problems with an activist from Omaha who had traveled here collecting consumer waste to prove the abundance of it on our public highways. This truly cultural event showed the average person that Jacksonville isn’t all suburbanites and rednecks, there are a good deal of “freaks” toting the banner for underdog causes.
But activism wasn’t the centerpiece, interactive artistic expression was the theme of the day, and the fruit seemed to be nothing more than incidental. From medieval re-enactors and local craftsmen to indie rockers playing soccer in American Apparel short shorts, the eclectic-ity of Riverside was represented well. Memorial Park was littered with piles of tangerines and there was a mysterious, orange “Tangerine Wheel” in the center of the park. It looked like a miniature Ferris Wheel that was half-surrounded by a fence that had spray cans laying around so you could add your own graffiti. In fact, the creative input of the patrons of the event was the centerpiece of the whole day.
To see the future, all you have to do is look at what the youth participate in. The Tangerine Festival is a terrific example of what people can accomplish when they embrace their own time and place and make something worthwhile happen where they are, instead of putting it off to some future time or some alternate place. Ultimately, I was glad that Mr. Ramsey didn’t have a wealth of information available, because I was glad I attended this neighborhood event. I enjoyed one of the reminders of why I love my River City. It is still a small enough town that I can walk into a public park in my neighborhood and share a lot of laughs with friends, as well as meet interesting new people.
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