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A few summers back, I was standing on Central Avenue with Steve Wedeen, not too far from his office above the Century Downtown theater. This was in the thick of the latest Downtown revitalization efforts, and I asked him a simple question.

"When you look up and down Central, what do you hear?"

The answer, then and now, of course, was noise: cars, trucks, scooters and the like.

What you didn't hear was the strains of any kind of music being performed live. Not a note of it.

Wedeen, a native New Yorker, got the point immediately.

That's a hole here - which is all the more reason to give some early applause to the city's Department of Cultural Affairs for starting the process of a permit program for street performers, or buskers if you will.

Let's take a breath and back up for a second for some historical perspective, because there's a huge freak-out if this isn't managed properly.

First, street performing has been a critical link in our cultural underpinnings for generations.

In colonial times, the first newspapers were sung broadside. Ben Franklin was a street performer. Thomas Jefferson played the fiddle on court dates. Sam Adams sung on the street. There are historical documents showing colonial Williamsburg had acrobats in their streets.

Street performing is where immigrants and the newly freed found their voices. Slaves, who couldn't perform in clubs, were street performers, and that time line goes through today with hip-hop. Louis Armstrong started on the streets. Irving Berlin, America's songwriter, started as a street singer.

It seemed like it was only days after the fall of the Soviet Union when there were eastern-bloc nationalities on the streets performing in American cities. Same for Haitians and certainly now for Latin American performers.

My memory takes me to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., one of the most amazing street scenes in the country back in the day that launched names like Tracy Chapman, James Taylor and the Violent Femmes, among others. Robin Williams started as a street mime.

It was an amazing scene, ragged and glorious and never dull.

That was then, but this is now. Cambridge, it turns out, has had a performers' permit process in place for years. And for some very good reasons that we should heed.

"One thing that drives artists to Harvard Square is tourism; they kind of work hand in hand," said Liz White, community arts administrator for the city. "The more performers, the more tourists."

The permit in Cambridge is fairly straightforward but, more important, affordable at $40. It's good for anyone, from a solo mandolin player to a band.

The catch?

The city has three staff members who carry sound meters to monitor the noise. They also mediate differences between the three major stakeholders in street performing: performers, local business owners and residents.

"The ordinance gives them (artists) some rights. It allows them to fight for their craft; they have an agency that helps protects their rights," White said.

Interesting point. White made a pretty compelling case that when artists have something they can wave, and police know what the rules are, cooler heads will prevail.

There's another reason, probably the biggest, why this ordinance should become a reality: safety.

"Studies have proven that street performers actually increase that sense of safety," said Steven Baird, director of Community Arts Advocates in Cambridge. "After 9/11, when people saw street performers in subways, they thought it was safe again."

We've got some thorns to fight through. Baird, who advocates for street performers with municipalities across the country, including Santa Fe, warns about the fairly recent panhandling ordinance as one in particular.

We really need to get in this game. It's going to take a good effort on everyone's part to accomplish, but the benefits are numerous and necessary. Until we do, it's all just noise.