Best Place To People Watch '97

Best Place To People Watch

Fourth Avenue

READERS' PICK: Deriving from our predatorial past, the primal urge to see without being seen is as undeniable as it is universal. Perhaps nowhere in our fair burg is this instinct better indulged than the stretch of Fourth Avenue that runs between University Boulevard and Congress Street. The once-rundown row of merchants and eateries has been vigorously reinvented in recent years, producing a strange hybrid of its former transience with its new-found permanence. Tidy storefronts boasting new and vintage clothing, hand-crafted jewelry, feminist books and complete costume attire (including the most impressive array of Cat-In-The-Hat stovepipes anywhere in the city) abut the funky Coyote Wore Sideburns hair salon, the food co-op, a gay bar, post office annex, smoke shop, and more cafés and tea houses than your jittery hands can accommodate in a single sitting. Twice yearly (winter and spring), the Fourth Avenue Street Fair multiplies the avenue's usual shopping and people-watching quotient by 10. (See Best Annual Festival.)

All along the avenue, day or night, you'll find society going about its business: unwashed masses "spare-changing" strangers; bored, tattooed-and-pierced teens bumming smokes in their baggy clothes; patchouli-burning hippies hawking handmade friendship bracelets and a bevy of people pedaling bikes, pushing strollers, being pulled by dogs, you name it. Among our favorite surreal Fourth Avenue experiences: sipping iced-coffee outside Epic Café as a guy wearing a beanie rolled past on a unicycle. "Now that's something you don't see every day," a fellow observer concurred.

For less interactive people-watching, take refuge in the Old Pueblo Trolley, which runs daily from south Fourth Avenue all the way down University Boulevard, for $2.50 round-trip. (Reduced Sunday fares are $1.25 round-trip, or 25 cents one-way.) In addition to the local color, you can get an eyeful of the growing number of murals from stem to stern (including the one near Value Village showcased in a scene from Kevin Costner's Tin Cup). Fourth Avenue's got it all.

READERS' POLL RUNNER-UP: Downtown Saturday Night (See Best Urban Ambiance.)

A REAL SCREAM: Superior Court, 110 W. Congress St. Through the course of our daily routines, most of us remain insulated from the general sea of humanity. We see our neighbors in passing, give the nod to our co-workers, bestow meaningless smiles upon our anonymous fellow shoppers; we recognize their familiarity, but we never ask their names. That's the great thing about jury duty: roll call. Sooner or later, anyone and everyone must pass through the halls of justice. Drunk drivers, sex offenders, pet stealers, bored housewives, minor local celebrities--who knows who the next person to empty their pockets in front of the hallowed arch of the city metal detector might be. And nowhere else can you better indulge your sense of schadenfreude than in that stuffy room with no windows, where car-sales moguls await their call to civic duty by doggedly shaking hands and passing out business cards to the bored and irritated masses, and nervous-looking, overdressed yuppies insinuate themselves between strung-out hippies and other general riffraff. It's like John Paul Sartre's No Exit, only it's real life, and it trudges on daily during business hours, just off Congress Street.

1998 Winner: Fourth Avenue
1996 Winner: Downtown Saturday Night
1995 Winner: Fourth Avenue