According to the photographs displayed in the mock-Tudor shopping square five blocks from here, I was living on the original street of Old Del Mar. In the 1880s a resort hotel stood on the several lots nearest the bluff. What remained were five small white cottages, designed originally to accommodate those elaborate rituals which occupied elder Victorians on any approach to the ocean. Now artists had taken them over, as they had taken over much of the rest of the block. Near as I could tell, my neighbors included four visual artists, five sculptors, two action architects, three musicians, a landscape gardener, a woodworker, a yogi, a nuclear engineer who had become a humanistic psychologist, a professional volleyball player, and two dancers. There were also, I think, two playwrights and a poet, but they were quite private about their work, and I knew them only as sunset jugglers. You will know them, and all others here, as shadows of their former selves. Their names do not match, and their actions, while true to the spirit of the street, are in detail imagined. What they say is also a gentle fiction, as was once the street itself.

Bob Pike, one of the action architects, claimed that it was the particular view from our street which attracted all the artists. Standing on his porch, itself constantly in a wildly organic state of repair, he looked out past the swing hanging from the Monterey cypress to the eroding bluff and the ocean beyond. “It’s like this. You come to California to see the world being itself, falling apart, building itself up again, ocean and rock, weeds, quakes. And this street is it: dead-ending into a concrete drainage ditch and old wooden piles, and the Santa Fe railroad tracks beneath, between the piles and the bluff, and the gopher on the bluff, and the landslides down about a hundred feet to the beach below.” He walked over to one of his contoured black-and-blue cement walls.“You know, this wall is not here to protect my garden — it doesn’t even go all the way around. It’s here to emphasize my sense that everything on this street is in motion, and that artists only catch the misleading instances of rest. That’s why my architecture is the way it is, you know. You design for the encounter between the people and the place.”

Cathy Morrison, the other action architect, agreed. She and her housemate Monk Pritchard, a sculptor, created what they called a kinetic habitat. Everything in their house moved, some of it at their command, some of it when they least expected. “For instance, three nights ago it was quite cold. The house decided to curl up. Oh, I know that sounds a little mystical, maybe even a little like Edgar Allan Poe, but that is what happened. Monk and I came home to find the walls curving inward, the furniture clustered together, the hot water faucet leaking. It was great.” Cathy showed me some of her blueprints for a house that could levitate. “It’s just a dream right now, but we’re serious about it, even so.” I was fascinated by a ten-foot-long hollow wooden cylinder hanging from two thin beams in the ceiling. An example of tectonics, Monk explained. “Look it up, go ahead. Tectonics is, first, the art of building functional beautiful things, and second, the science of earth structure. When I found that out maybe two years ago, I got inspired. You see, this cylinder is a sculpture, a finely-tuned seismographic device, and a musical instrument, all in one. Tectonics. However the environment changes, the cylinder registers the change: wind, geological shifts, sunlight, temperature.” Monk tapped the elegantly fluted surface. “B flat today.” He checked some lovely arrows painted on a woven rug. “Point four oh five degrees off level.” He thought for a few seconds. “A good day tomorrow, I bet. Good surf, mostly sunny, high 70s.” Cathy interrupted, “Of course we’re not weather prophets. It’s just that in a kinetic habitat, you become, well sensitive to things, and what you design is basically an extension of that sensitivity. And when you walk down this street, you sure can feel that sensitivity we all have to our environment.”

Could you? On the front lawns of half a dozen houses, other sculptors had mounted their works. I asked them about the relationship between their projects and this street, this environment. How sensitive were they to Tenth Street?

“Plenty.” Art Madison was speaking, as he usually did, with a thin cigar in his mouth. “I’ve molded these pieces here to resemble, exactly, down to the scars and little bits of grit, old-time redwood surfboards. They were big heavy mothers, yet somehow they had a grace to them, they were more a part of the ocean than what we get nowadays, plastic, foam, polywhatever. And I don’t think I would have been moved to make these pieces if I hadn’t somehow caught the oldtimeyness of this street. These redwood boards, they’re historical, almost ancient. Like redwoods. And this street, it’s historical, oldest street in Del Mar, goes back to the Civil War. More than a hundred years old, scars, grit. See what I’m saying?”

Raul Josephs also sculpted pieces modeled after surfboards, but he believed in creating total environments. Scattered between the surfboard forms were others that evoked flippers, wet suits, bars of wax, goggles, suntan lotion bottles. “Sure I’m affected by this street,” he said.“Sure. Maybe not its history, but I came to this street a couple years ago ’cause I needed to feel the ocean and be by myself, quiet. And this street has the ocean and it has quiet. Maybe being historical makes it quiet. A kind of awe, you think?” I stared down at some of the wet suits splayed across the grass, admiring their sense of anatomy. Raul noticed my admiration. “They’re like skins, aren’t they? And once you wriggle out of them, you’re almost unrecognizable. I guess that’s the way this street works; it’s so old you can sink back into being unrecognizable, or you can make something really exciting because you have a better finger on all the changes.”

Not every artist was happy with all the changes Gopal Matucek, a printmaker who did most of his lithography at studios 20 miles south in San Diego, wanted his living space to be separable from his artistic space. “But I was also looking for a space that would be inspiring or at least aesthetic.” Gopal was worried that the street was becoming so crowded with faddish artists that it would soon be nothing more than another Laguna. His friend and neighbor, Artur J., a more radical artist who called himself a progressive cultural worker, saw the crowd of artists on Tenth Street as a missed opportunity for organizing. “I’m against all this competition that capitalism sets up between artists. Here we are living around so many artists, and we should be sharing things. We should be making art in unison, fighting injustice, violating the fascist copyright laws. Instead, everyone is just blind, solitary. All power to the people and all people to the paint pots. Groovy slogan, huh? I made that up myself.”

Actually, there had been some cooperation between the artists. They had labored together to fix up a playground on the one vacant lot near the bluff: the cypress swing, an herb garden for the blind, a miniature Frisbee course, a volleyball net, a barbecue pit, a few colorful crawl spaces disguised by ice plant. There had also been a block party devoted to the issue of a young vagrant woman whom the neighborhood hoped to adopt as a model for figure-drawing classes. The landscape gardener, Lou Northcott, had teamed up with the woodworker, Kevin Noritaki, to rehabilitate the street sign. The yogi (who has preferred to remain anonymous) counseled several of the artists when they found themselves at spiritual/aesthetic sticking points, and Ed Feinman had used journal therapy to improve the jump shots of the professional volleyball player.

Nonetheless, some residents were disappointed that the beauty of the street had not led to many peak experiences. They came to Tenth

Street expecting an exciting collective experiment in the arts, and they found instead a short dead-end street with no lampposts and no sidewalks. “It would be okay,” Toni Giambattista said, “if you could dance in the streets and get other people to join you. But that just doesn’t happen here. Too many cars, too many visitors coming to look at the sunset, too many surfers running down the street to catch the last waves.” An Oriental dancer, Toni practiced on a cement lifeguard platform on the bluff. “I like to watch the sun flying down toward the horizon to meet the water. I always watch for the green spark that flares up at the sunset. The whole environment fits with my dances. But there are too many strangers here, too many dogs running loose, and it’s hard to keep the mood. I don’t know, I like the people who live on the street, but I want something more.”

Did I detect a similar note of disappointment in the words of another dancer, Timothy Plass, who worked up his jazz routines on the beach very early in the morning? “You can’t be distracted if you’re devoted to your art. If I let the tourists and the lifeguard Jeeps interfere with my choreography, that would be a sign I’d lost my devotion. Tenth Street’s a good place to be, I won’t knock it. It’s not Manhattan, but who really wants Manhattan anyway? When you come here, you gotta be ready for enlightenment. You see a sign on the bluff, ‘Dangerous, Keep Clear,’ and you gotta think to yourself, what does that mean? And you know what that means to me? It means I have to keep my head clear, be daring, and walk that bluff even while the ground is slipping away from underneath me. After all, I’m a dancer.”

It is Sunday afternoon now on Tenth Street. I am back, visiting, four years later. I can hear the synthesizer music of one new arrival (a former physicist), whose wife today is out in the yard fashioning a garden in felt and cotton cut to resemble begonias and fuchsias. A watercolorist is having a garage sale two doors down, and people are walking by carrying seascapes, stormscapes, and old paint-by-number sets. I have promised to help set up lights for a jazz concert this evening on the patio of one of the oldest houses, restored to its original façade. The house still bears a marker from the bicentennial celebrations, and every so often photographers from local papers come around to catch it in a different pattern of publicity. The concert will feature a bass player and a guitarist, resident talent. They usually meditate for 30 minutes just before their performance, so a group of us will prepare a power center for them on the patio under one of the jacaranda trees.

Somehow, I am not sorry I left.