It’s another batch still obviously uninitiated into the finer points of street etiquette. They’re a jarring contrast to the quiet presence of the long term regulars like Dancing Girl and Italian Mama, and all the nameless silent shufflers and brassy strutters. The sad cases so painful to see. They vanish for weeks or months at a time, only to bob up again on the low brick fence opposite our window to offer themselves up like tin ducks for potshots from the passing parade of sad men in cars. Cruising for sour release and coming up tramps.

And yet somehow my friends from north of the river still manage to call St Kilda ‘the shiny part of town’. They dismiss it as overrun with yuppies and no longer what it once was. Pretentious and brash. Ruined. But that’s no more successful an attempt to nail down the essence of this seaside municipality than another other. It’s not the imagined genteel seaside resort of the 1870’s; nor the imagined foil wrapped shooting gallery of the ‘70s; nor the imagined preening café lifestyle of the turn of the last century.

I mean, sit at my window long enough and you’ll see a broader vista of the human experience than the stimulant-fuelled angst of Saturday night or endless reruns of Lifestyles of the Rich and Vacuous. St Kilda still comforts with the familiar and shocks with the new. Turning each rough edged time of day up to the light reveals another facet to this gem of a place.

Children walking to school past real estate agents laying out their little signs for the true believers. The Mission breakfast crew following their timeless routines to a warm cuppa and a slice of toast. Flinty eyed cyclists racing up the rush hour hill of Grey Street like competitors in their own private commuter Olympics. Creative types networking at the gallery a few doors down. The slow old man, white socks and brown leather sandals, breaking ‘plain label’ bread for the pigeons. The serious German backpacker with sensible boots, sensible backpack and insulated water bottle, consulting the divining rod of her guidebook. The Indian student, brakeman for the scenic railway in purple Wittingslow trousers. The cheeky Chinese kids from the milk bar next door. The tightly wound incarcerated tensions of the boarding house tenants slowly uncoiling in sunny freedom. The party boy in the convertible, all sunglassed self regard and brochured lifestyle maintenance. The damaged and the lost. The pram pushers and the pimps. The junkie shuffle and the stiletto totter. The bogans from the burbs and the junkies I nearly stepped on fucking in the entranceway to our apartment block.

So what is the real essence of this place? What does this postcode, this collection of streets, boil down to? Is it merely diversity, as though other places in this city of ours were not diverse? Or is it to do with the sheer numbers of people that live and pass through St Kilda? Certainly a high density of population leads to a denseness of human connection and St Kilda is teeming with people. Laid down like some archaeological layer cake of deposited narrative, making up in geographical proximity for what it lacks in socioeconomic or cultural uniformity. A tangled script of subplot sprouting from the one fertile seaside plot.

Such fertile seed beds are scattered throughout inner city Melbourne, of course, but still there’s a particular, peculiar, ebb and flow to this suburb. Everything flows rather than endures. Social change is an old story here, marked by the brown stained water levels of past highs and lows and the memories of how this place adapted to these changes. That’s the only essence to be found. It can’t be grasped… we can only dangle our fingers in its slipstream.

You can see this flow in the buildings which are the constructed fabric of St Kilda. Architecturally it’s nothing if not eclectic and there are buildings out of time encrusted all over the hull of Our Lady of St Kilda like barnacles. Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco. 60’s six pack apartment blocks on stilts with cars scuttling underneath like cockroaches. 80’s relics in a smooth and silky bland. All lined up like suspects in a streetfront whodunit.

Everything from the glorious Eildon Mansion, shorn of its landed grandeur and turning its once proud face from the grunge of Grey Street, to an ex-footballers panegyric to his penis. This New Man’s phallic folly, testimony to the performance anxieties of middle age, is now registered for preservation. An erection that will simply go Onan Onan on. The beautiful gone or sadly diminished while the banal endures. It all seems so random.

So the grand French Consulate survives behind the hoardings on Fitzroy Street. The POW has been internally botoxed, the George remains in shabby, stately hauteur and the Espy scowls antisocially under a towering hangover of smoked glass and antiseptic stylelessness.

And Schehezerade is gone, leaving a gap in Acland street’s sweet toothed smile. That place was never just a café to me but a knot of narrative meaning, murmuring in the background of my time as a St Kilda local. I’ve never read the stories bearing its name; I never even had a coffee there. Still I always felt its presence as I passed on my irregular elliptical way, a deeply physical presence with the cultural gravity, the heft, to tug on the physical and human weave of the street. Even the font style in which that resonant name was written had local weight. Schehezerade was part of the story of this place. It simply felt good to have it there.

And now it’s not there. And try as I might, I simply can’t imagine someone writing thoughtful pieces on the narrative echoes of a chain clothing store.

So whatever is to be loved in this suburb is to be loved while it is here. The chess tables in the Botanic Gardens; the gates of the long gone nursery on Grey Street, the adventure playground. Succulent Veg Out hanging like Tantalus’ grapes while the real estate agents salivate from across the road. All of this is a temporary essence and all the sweeter for its impermanence. It could all be gone tomorrow.

Even more ephemeral however are the human landmarks that have somehow lodged in the collective municipal memory and which in passing leave the more painful yet transitory ache.

Richard’s dead, by way of example. He was an old alcoholic echo of the 1940’s, of men’s hats and single breasted austerity suits and a brown 5pm in Brack’s monotone Collins Street.  “Where’s my Donna? Where’s my girl?” he’d cheekily ask me every time I passed him on the steps of the mission or outside under the faded picture of Remembrance Day in the window of Danby’s electoral office. I’d bustle past to get my ticket, off to work in my own 21st century update of Brack’s rush hour on the number 96. Singleminded amongst the phalanx of sharp suits, white earplugs and fashionable cardboard coffee cups.

Too trapped by the pressure of the here and now to attend his funeral, I heard later that hundreds turned up at Sacred Heart Church for the farewell. Was everyone there also touched by the cold sense, as I was, that Richard’s passing had diminished St Kilda in some small yet significant way? He was another bollard tying this place’s present to its fading memories. He was always there… until he wasn’t.

And Eileen. She’ll go one day too. Born in our building, or so she says. Her father was the St Kilda station master.

Or so she says.

But then, who am I to doubt her? God knows, I’d prefer that to be the truth. It would be one more tie to bind me to this place’s history.

But yes, change rolls ever onwards and St Kilda bears it as well as any place can, and yet better than many. For starters St Kilda goes not quietly into the dark night. It kicks and screams bloody murder. Lies down in front of the bulldozer of the blind future. It’s not that this place can freeze change, or even wants to. And anyway it’s seen too much change to ever believe such a thing possible. No, it’s just that St Kilda refuses to be taken for a ride.

  Right now, for instance, is another moment of flux for St Kilda. I know I can’t be the only one to feel it. Listen in the quiet hours of dawn and you can hear the soft footfalls of the financial crisis padding through this corner of the city, pausing only to piss on the doorstep of the developers’ dreams. We’ve all been mainlining cheap credit for years to maintain this secret life of ours and so after the fatted calf comes the cold turkey. The next change will be a slowing in the frenetic pace of change as we switch from leadfooting the credit accelerator to slamming on the brakes of debt.

It’s already started. My partner and I have been monitoring the PPI, or Pizza Price Index, ever since debtonation day on distant Wall Street and places offering the ubiquitous dish for $10 or under are breaking out like mildew over the shiny surfaces of St Kilda. $5 pizzas any day of the week except Saturday. $10 pizza any day of the week (plenty to choose from). How long can the $22 pizzas at one pretentious establishment survive, hanging on the menu by the skin of their imported sausage?

Other changes will no doubt increase as the deceleration struggles against our momentum. How long before the flood of flabby sunburnt chavs, resplendent in their Premier league shirts and denim minis, starts to trickle through the cracks opened up by the incredible shrinking pound? The hostels will slowly empty. And the layers will shift again.

But you know… St Kilda will be alright. The sense of place here, consistent through all the changes that have been both embraced and visited upon it, will be our greatest asset. Creativity survives a downturn, as does a good cup of coffee. And when the next cohort of angry youngsters from across Melbourne creates their next music of protest and rebellion the Espy will be there to provide them with a forum. It’s how we handle change that makes this place, in the end. The passing parade of locals neither speeds nor slows, of course, but I think the pace of physical change, the breakneck speed of development, will slow.

Maybe we might have a little less future and a little more past. For now, at least.

For a little while.