The city has a big problem with rose peddlers. You can't take three steps without a rose peddler trying to hawk a rose to you. There are as many rose peddlers as there are tourists. The tourists hate them. They're obnoxious and very dedicated to selling you a wilted, half-dead rose. Spending the whole day in the heat and humidity , running around hustling roses and escaping the cops tends to hike the odor factor up considerably. The city is old. It sits right on the ocean so the humidity is always high. Because they used to tax property by the width of the property, the old merchants, traders and various rich people would build their houses one room wide. They built them ten rooms deep and four stories high with just enough space between the homes for a carriage to get through. The streets were barely wide enough for two carriages to pass. It was sort of a tunnel. It didn't mean much then.

It does now. The old cobblestones have been asphalted over and we have cars trying to get down these streets. The fumes and the humidity are trapped . The law orders that the carriage horses be put back in their barn when it hits 95. No law orders people off the streets no matter what the temperature is or the humidity factor. The tourists are sweating like, umm, tourists and the horses are being kept cool. The tourist go from an air conditioned store to another air conditioned store to an air conditioned eatery. Not so bad for them. The rose peddlers are out in the heat and humidity all the time. They start to stink early and get worse as the day goes on. Even the street people shy away from them.

Occasionally, some tourist would buy a rose hoping to keep the other peddlers away. Tourists are crazy that way. The rose peddlers spot a tourist with a rose and they think-mark! The locals hate the tourists so for years nothing was done about it. The locals wished the tourists would send the money and stay home. The merchants felt the same way. Then, a lot of tourists started saying they would stay away and so would their money. This got the merchants attention. The merchants, while wishing the tourists would just send them the money, weren't crazy. They were greedy.

Since money talks, especially if it's saying goodbye, the merchants complained to city council about it. City council listened even though they too wished the tourists would mail in the money. The extra money they brought in helped keep local taxes low and services high. This kept the council members in office. Being in office was the sole goal of these, and any other, politicians. Nothing moves a politician as quickly as the possibility of losing an election and having to get a real job. City council passed an ordnance requiring a permit to sell roses and limited the number of permits. Problem solved, they said.. Politicians are just as crazy as tourist.

What the ordnance did was make a new class of criminals for the police to chase around. With the heat and humidity, they aren't to happy about it. They have a tendency to make rough arrests. Fortunately for the police, there is no local chapter of the ACLU here. The peddlers put it down as the risk you take. A cop will see one of the peddlers and yell for him to freeze. The peddler runs, of course. The peddler, being young and fast, gains a little on the cop very quickly. The the peddler makes a right, then another right, then another right and is now behind the cop. It's back to business as usual.

Waterfront Park is a huge attraction for tourists, rose peddlers and cops. The tourists love seeing the ocean. It's bigger than Miller's Pond. The fountains are bigger than Miller's Pond. The rose peddlers love it because of the number of marks all gathered together in one area. The cops love it because of the high number of arrests they can make. It's a good deal all around.

The police patrol the park on PTV's. That pedal-powered, three-wheeled vehicles. Tricycles. A rose peddler tries to sell to a tourist, gets seen by a cop and the race is on. Fast as they are, the rose peddlers can't outrun a cop on a tricycle. One of them spotted a fountain off to his right. A fountain with steps. Ha, he thought. Can't get that bike up the steps, so up he went. The cop knew he couldn't get up the steps so he circled around. The peddler was trapped, running around the fountain like a squirrel on LSD. He finally passed out from the heat and humidity and the cop got a nice atttaboy for his file.

Cops chasing rose peddlers has become a tourist attraction in it's own right.