Today comes the news that the City of Phoenix, in its desperate need to pretend to be a city of the East instead of a city of the West, is paying street performers, who are normally mendicants, to infest downtown:

A stretch of Adams Street in the center city is now known as "Performance Street," and over the next month, and possibly longer, performers will be entertaining workers over the lunch hour twice a week as they walk to and from restaurants and dine at outdoor tables.

"We're going to turn Adams Street into a stage of creativity and vitality," said Brian Kearney, president and CEO of the Downtown Phoenix Partnership, which is coordinating the program with the help of funding from businesses.

The idea came from Mayor Phil Gordon, who was impressed with the street performers he saw during a visit to Santa Monica, Calif. "A community isn't a community without artists and performers," Gordon said during a ceremony kicking off the program.

Because Kearney didn't know how to find street performers, he turned to Stephen Strange, a Phoenix vaudeville/circus performer who said he tapped into the "loose network of street performers" in the Valley. They will be paid a nominal fee, plus tips, to perform along Adams on Tuesdays and Thursdays and at various downtown spots on nights when there are major events.

"It was important to get paid something because there is no real culture of tipping down here yet," Strange said. "Hopefully that will pick up."

In the cities of the East, the picking up is done by the police, who roust street-performing vagrants because they block pedestrian traffic. This is something the City of Phoenix could discover if there were any pedestrian traffic downtown.