In Austin we’ve got Leslie http://www.angelfire.com/tx2/austinpics/images/leslie.jpg
The guy’s actually quite bright and likable. He’s even been in some Austin-based commercials.
Another interesting site in DC is the Peace Vigil in Lafeyette Park in front of the White House. They’ve been there for quite a few years, 24/7, basically living there in shifts. Their beliefs are somewhat unorthodox, to say the least…interesting people to talk to, though.
Urban Crazy People are everywhere. Even in a pissant whitebread mountain town like Adelaide, Australia (population = 1,200,000 Flanders family clones and one psychogumby …)
We have a semi-famous Urban Crazy Person. There’s this big guy with a dark complexion that walks around the streets of Adelaide wearing nothing but a black cape, black underpants with silver piping and a pair of knee-high white rubber boots.
During the summer months, he may go out without the cape.
No-one knows who he is or why he dresses as he does, but he is very well known in this part of the world - he has even been on television.
And you thought the only things South Australia had to offer were fine wine and unusually perverse serial killers.
She apparently moved or took a vacation. I saw someone fitting this EXACT description in a Phoenix restaurant 2-3 years ago. She was chain smoking and walking to the various tables and spritzing them with Lysol. It was so bad my girlfriend at the time and I complained to the manager (we were both weirdo lovers; so it was unusual for us to complain about eccentrics.)
He was really good and promised to keep her Lysol safe and give it to her when she left but told her she couldn’t be bothering the other customers like that. Very friendly but you knew he was going to end up with that can or the lady was going to end up out on hers. True to his word, I saw him hand it back to her when she left about 30 min after.
In the mid-1980s, UCLA was the frequent stomping ground of ** The Peeper.** He was a middle-aged man who would walk around campus hiding his face behind a newspaper. He would peep over the top, under the bottom, and around each side, as he walked about. Seemed harmless.
I used to see that guy all the time when I lived in Kenmore.
Wonder where he’s gone now that they knocked down the building he used to hang out in front of.
I’ll add:
In Cambridge, MA:
Policeman AKA Cowboy
Hangs out in various locations in Central Square, but primarily at the 1369 Coffeehouse. Some days he wears a quasi-policeman’s outfit, with a police hat, tall boots and a vest with a reflective white X on it, similar to the vests police wear to direct traffic. Has a toy gun in a little holster on his hip. Another of his favorite outfits is a cowboy outfit. He wears a fringed vest, teeny tiny cowboy hat perched atop his wild puff of hair, and carries a 2-foot tall stuffed pony. Has a toy gun in a little holster on his hip - possibly recycled from the Policeman outfit.
He seems to be fairly normal, in that he sits at the 1369 all day and has conversations with the patrons. I do not think he is homeless.
After seeing this fellow off and on for two years when I worked in Central Square, I was on my way to a local nightspot the Middle East when I noticed a mural on the side of a building, dated in the 1970s, of life in Central Square and he is in the mural wearing a Drum Major’s outfit.
Mumbly
Hangs out in Inman Square, I’ve seen him as far afield as Harvard Square. He looks normal, is an older gentleman, about 60 years old, neatly dressed, usually in khakis and a button-down shirt. He smokes heavily and mumbles at you. He looks right at you and mumbles incoherently as though you can understand him, and he spits profusely when he mumbles.
Around Phoenix, AZ, there’s another Cross-bearing guy (not Arthur Blessit, this cross is much smaller than the one Arthur Blessit carries and he also looks nothing like Arthur Blessit). He generally carries the cross while riding a bicycle with no hands down the middle of the outermost lane of the street around 4 p.m. (thereby restricting traffic to one lane) and locals will drive by, honk, and wave to him in a friendly way. (Just hope he doesn’t run into someone who doesn’t bother to get out of his lane…) I also saw him once at another time standing on the sidewalk without his bike jumping around and people smiled, honked, and waved also.
I saw her a few times when I was in North York for an extended stay a few years back.
Here in Santa Cruz, we have the Dancing Guy, and he spends his days doing exactly what his name suggests.
Then there’s the bicycle lady. She’s hunched over with white wild hair. She rarely rides her bike, but rather pushes it about. She often stops and just stands wherever she is at the time. Due to her hair, you can’t see her face. While she’s standing there, she punctuates her silence with the occasional gutteral grunt/yell. Sometimes she’ll stop right in the middle of a parking lot aisle, and folks just kind of have to drive around her.
I haven’t seen him in a few months, but for awhile, we had the Isolationist Guy. He sat on a bench downtown with his little grocery cart of belongings. He constructed a little head to toe fort around himself using garbage bags. You couldn’t see into them, but he could obviously see out, as when someone walked by, he would say “Have a nice day”. If you thanked him or returned his suggestion, he would welcome or thank you. There was a nice little article on him in one of the local papers, and it turns out the reason he started wishing everyone a nice day was as an attempt to be noticed in a positive fashion for his run for the presidency of the US. I’ve no idea if he got any write-in votes, but he may have. He also often had a sign which proclaimed, among other things, that there was no such thing as God. I liked him. In the article, he stated that he hid in the garbage bags in order to have privacy. It’s probably for the best that he didn’t capture the presidency.
We have the Singing Guy, but I don’t see him as much as in years past. With an excellent sense of improv humor, he would just wail away on his guitar and either butcher classics or make up his own songs based on whatever was going on around him. At times, he would show up on the street dressed as a clown and entertain kids with jokes and baloon animals. In non-clown mode, you could tell sometimes that he had a lot of anger, towards what I don’t know.
We only had one member of the fringe in my old hometown, but then there were less than 3000 of us total.
Our character was Al. Al was a reed-thin fellow, not very bright, but quite friendly. Al was a sports fanatic, and was known for never missing any game played by one of our high school teams. He is known to have walked nearly 150 miles for a game on at least one occasion, although he managed to catch a ride back. Even though he walked to most games, he always seemed to be one of the first people there–the benefit of a big head start.
wevets, thanks for reminding me of the Hate Guy! He’s been there for years. I used to see him daily when I worked at Leopold Records on Durant right off of Telegraph. Another guy I remember from Berkeley was Lounge Guy. He would hold court in Sproul Plaza and belt out standards from the Andy Williams-Frank Sinatra-Tony Benett genre. In between songs, he would talk to whoever was in earshot about how his agent was just putting the finishing touches on his big recording contract, and soon he would be in LA recording hits. He had a decent voice, but his timing was always off, and his phrasing was pretty monotonous. Fun to watch while eating lunch on the steps, though.
Huh…odd…when I’ve seen him, he’s been hanging out in City Hall Plaza, and seems to think that he’s the mayor 
I don’t live in an urban area, I live in a small town, but we have our strange people. The one that comes to mind right now is The Artist (not the one formerly known as Prince).
The Artist is a guy who apparently suffers from a great deal of mental illness but is able to function in the everyday world because of medication. However, he rarely stays at home.
He’s usually out on his bicycle, picking up trash. He might use some things in his art. He’s very talented, very smart, but you can hardly get a word in edgewise with him.
I know this because he was the set designer for our school musical. I had a lot of extra rehearsals while he was working on the set, and he would strike up conversations with me, mostly about music and theatre. He would get so worked up, he’d act out everything. He can do a KILLER Go-Go’s impression. It was very amusing.
He’s a nice guy, but he never thought I was the right choice for the female lead of the musical until he came to see it.
We have a few other strange people, but none so odd as this one.
Sydney’s remarkable “Eternity Man”, Arthur Stace.
I mentioned the Metrobus 23 line earlier. This particular line gets more than its share of fringe elements becuase it passes right in front of SOC (Sheltered Occupational Center, I think), a work-rehab center for Northern Virginia’s mentally ill population. A bunch of 'em can be seen in the afternoon either on the 23C (leaves Crystal City Metro around 3:50, passes in front of the center 10 minutes later) or the 23A (scheduled to leave from a couple blocks east of the center at 4:23). These people can be a bit raucous but one in particular stands out: a woman who had the habit of making occasional pig noises and would somtimes pull signal cord just for the hell of it. Some drivers would disable their signal bell when she gets on.
LOL! Just checked back on this thread. In my household we call him “mumbles” too. Mayor “Mumbles” Menino.
My BF can do a great imitation of him. We used to see him (rarely) at a bar in Charlestown - he isn’t any more intelligible after a few pints.
When I was going to college at Northwestern, I often encountered Bicycle Helmet Guy. This was a guy who would accost any bicyclist who was not wearing a helmet and give them a long diatribe about why they should be wearing a helmet. If you were lucky, he’d show you the scar on his skull from when he got in a bad biking accident when he wasn’t wearing a helmet.
Sometimes if he couldn’t find any good biker targets, he’d target pedestrians and make sure they were aware that when they DID happen to be riding a bike, they should be sure to wear their helmet.
I liked the guy. A little weird, a little overzealous, but at least it was for a good cause.
I can’t speak for the entire city of Akron, only my McDonald’s. We have Greg, the headphone man. Greg hears voices, so he wears a portable headphone radio. Unfortuneately, the music is so loud he has to shout to hear himself talk. We also have bradley, Mr. overalls. This man is an owner of several rental properties, but dresses like a vagrant. At Christmas he gets a New pair of overalls. He then proceeds to wear them until they Rot off his body. Sometimes he doesn’t button the side buttons. This usually leads to someone getting flashed, boy howdy we sure know how to have fun at work.
On the Toronto commuter trains, there’s Chewing Lady. She is an older lady, white-haired, small in stature, always in the same hat, who continually, ceaselessly, appears to be chewing some kind of gum. I’m sure she’s just an old lady going home, but she’s quite recognisable, and I feel just a little uneasy when she’s around. Kinda sad, really.
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Then there’s the Decorated House And Store. At 17 Simpson Avenue (just east of Broadview Avenue), there is an older brick house that almost appears to be abandoned: although it has mostly boarded-up windows, and isn’t in the greatest shape, the lawn is apparently mowed semi-regularly. All non-brick surfaces are painted with random colours, as from leftover paint cans. Crudely-lettered slogans adorn the house: ‘Our Cops are Tops’, ‘Will the Globe and Mail Admit Its Errors’, ‘Drunks kill Children Every Day’ and the like.
The house number is painted on an old barrel in the front yard. For a long time the front door was labeled with something like, ‘This door was graciously donated by #9 across the street’.
There are several cars in the yard, and a few blocks away on Gerrard Street there is a storefront, all with the same treatment.
I’ve never seen the owner, but if he/she’s anything like the bouse…
I’m sure there’s a long sad story behind it all.
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Downtown Madison, Wisconsin is home to Scanner Dan. He’s a bit chubby and unkept, and always has a police scanner (in fact, he hates it when you call him Scanner Dan). He hangs out along State Street and just shouts a lot. He knows all the fraternities and sororities at the UW–where they are, what type of people are members–which seems a bit upsetting. He likes harassing the preachers that come to save the college students’ souls. Evidently, he’s the relative of a local politician, who puts him up in an apartment.