I never thought I'd live to see it: A total music weekend right here in downtown Norman, with Main Street closed to infernal-combustion-engine traffic for the first of what hopes to be annual Norman Music Festival last Saturday and Andrews Park staked out for the venerable and ever-popular (with me, anyway) Groovefest last Sunday.

A truly all-ages crowd, ranging from people even older than I am to babes in arms; bands you know playing music from this millennium; a Chainsaw Kittens reunion; children inspired by the Starkweather Boys into trying the jitterbug (not all of the music was from this millennium); and on the Sooner Theatre stage my beloved Klipspringer, the band that's going to play at my wake when the time comes.

I know, I know, this was a logical step in the transformation of downtown into an arts district, but I never thought Norman wanted an arts district. What I assumed our city fathers and mothers were trying to create -- legislate, in fact -- was not an active arts district, but an arts district in the early stages of decline: an arts district at the point where the artists start moving out.

Consider the natural -- meaning with no help from city government -- evolution of an urban commercial district from blighted to trendy via the arts.

What does a struggling artist need? Space. Space viewed both as square footage and as freedom to color outside the lines, so to speak. Where does a struggling artist find space? One likely place is an old commercial/warehouse district where rents are cheap because nobody else wants to locate there.

So a few artists move in and word gets around the arts community that our district has what you're looking for. The big room with a high ceiling to accommodate heroic-size statues and an oversize garage door for getting them out when they're finished. The place your band can rehearse into the wee hours without disturbing the neighbors because the few neighbors left are businesses where everyone goes home by 6 p.m. The place your acting troupe can store props, work out blocking and build sets. And if you want to toss in a sleeping bag and call it home, nobody's going to care -- not the owner whose building is safer from theft and vandalism if someone's sleeping on the premises, and not the police who have too much on their plates to bother with anybody who's not stealing, gang-banging or cooking meth.

So the artists move in, followed by allied businesses -- a framing shop, a club to be a venue for various performances, a gallery, a coffee house, a restaurant. As word gets around that our district is where it's happening, more people want to live there: writers, poets, hip young urbanites and people like me who enjoy having interesting neighbors and don't care if they make noise, decorate their property in an unusual manner or strip down to loincloths, paint themselves blue and sacrifice a watermelon on the sidewalk.

Some of the hip young urbanites aren't going to want housing that's not, strictly speaking, fit for human habitation and some of our artists are now earning enough to fix up their digs, so architects and contractors get hired and some fine loft apartments take shape. Then buildings get bought and converted into high-rent housing, more upscale businesses move in and our district becomes trendy.

This is the point I think Norman is aiming at, but this is the point where the artists start moving out. The rents get so high a struggling artist can't afford to live there, and the people moving into the luxury apartments have a different set of values. Having paid so much for their housing, they don't want their neighbors doing anything that might lower their property values. Needing to be at work in the morning, they don't want to share a wall with a rock band that rehearses until 3 a.m.

The neighborhood can become just the latest fashionable place to live, or if it has acquired a unique character or something of artistic significance happened there it might be preserved in amber as a historic district.

Or, since the theaters, clubs and galleries are there, it could remain the arts district -- but only if there's someplace nearby where emerging artists can live. And that's what Norman, with its "pro-active code enforcement" in the areas surrounding downtown, is doing its best to prevent. Even if a neighborhood wants to embrace its artists with pride or adopt a live-and-let-live attitude ("I won't gripe about the piles of 'found objects' and the 8-foot orange albatross with the face of President Bush in your yard if you won't gripe about the 'Vette I'm slowly restoring in mine"), it's not going to happen.

In my view, the place that's ripe for an artists' colony is Goldsby: easy access to I-35 (i.e., the markets), a steady supply of keep-body-and-soul-together-while-you're-making-it jobs at the casino and a populace that's inclined to think the Law has better things to do than hassle a man about parking his pickup on his own land.

But after last weekend, I can hope that maybe I'm wrong. I saw a kid in a T-shirt that read, "Keep Austin weird. Support our local musicians." If Austin can handle "weird," why not Norman -- if not the whole city, at least one small part of it? It seems more sensible to me than trying to encourage an arts district by discouraging artists.

Linda Henley 366-3542 citydesk@normantranscript.com