Urban Golfing with Patrick Barr on Jersey Street

He don’t need no caddy.  Just a couple dozen stuffed lunchbox milk cartons, a pitching wedge, and a trash can target.  That’s how Patrick Barr passes time while selling his photographic art. Usually that happens in the vicinity of Petrosino Park, but we caught him practicing on Jersey Street earlier this week.  It’s a brilliant publicity stunt to help capitalize on his life’s work.

Barr refers to his invented street game as “urban golfing,” and we can’t help but evoke Bill Murray’s classic “Cinderella story” scene from Caddyshack (“It looks like a mirac…it’s in the hole!”). Dressed the part, he lines up the milk cartons and swings at each in rapid-fire succession, hoping for that ever elusive hole can-in-one. The message?

I will encourage little and big kids alike, to drink their milk, recycle the containers, and take on the frustrating game of urban golf. This is designed to keep them off their computers and away from online predators, and get them back on the streets where they belong.

Yet many out there don’t even notice the golfing itself.  We chatted with Barr for a few minutes the other day, talking in his backswing, and in that time, passersby moved along seemingly oblivious to the situation. Either plugged into technology or the standard tunnel vision. However, one group of kids held his attention long enough to learn that he usually sinks one out of three hundred or so hits (and allegedly two “back-to-backs” in four years). Damn!

January 2012

For the last few years, Barr’s beat has been in and around the Little Italy environs, but usually across from McNally Jackson Books (before that, the Blue Note). Always spotted playing the same old game. According to the 100 People Project, the artist-athlete is a self-taught shutterbug who uses an old Pentax camera, and develops the rolls of film.

It is his profile that graced so much of the downtown street furniture in the recent past, pasted on light poles and doorways alike.

[Photo Credit: Tigerhood64]