Historic 4th Avenue budget fashion, food, and broken hearts

The Spring and Fall Fourth Avenue Street Fairs are famous. I’d even heard of them in Los Angeles. But what does Fourth Ave. look like when there is no side-by-side line-up of white canopies with vendors hawking their artisan goods? Well, it still is an interesting low-budget shopping street that appears to be targeting the nearby University of Arizona student market.

Let me take you on a short walk up 4th Avenue starting at 8th street. (I love this feature of Tucson: the use of numbers for both streets–which go east-west and avenues which go north-south. Fortunately it is not city-wide–just in an old Historic Fourth Avenue District near downtown are there numbered streets in both directions.)

Start with fashion

For fashion on 4th Avenue there is a Goodwill retail store — complete with a Joe Pagac mural. He has broken with tradition and included orange California poppies on this mural, but the wild west cowboy is there. (Click to see it.)

Across the street are a couple of thrift-type stores: one conveniently called the Tucson Thrift Shop; the other named The Other Side. If you are looking for a hat to buy, The Other Side has a window full of them. The green golfing beret is interesting, as it the black top hat and the beige cloche with gold ribbon.

Walk a little further up 4th and you come across Love Locks on both side of the street. I always think of putting locks on public structures — a bridge or, in this case, two small sculptures–as a European thing. But Tucson now has two places for lovers to pledge eternal love right on 4th Avenue. I think there is also a bit of wishful thinking with the mosaic reading “Be Kind” on the Blue container. I suspect locks often lead to broken hearts.

Continue onward to 4th and 7th and at the end of the block is the Hippy Gypsy mural of famous musicians from back in the Sixties on a clothing store. I would have guessed it was a music venue, but Google Maps tells me otherwise. Whatever it is, it appears to be closed.

And across 7th Street is another mural on the side of the Antigone bookstore. This mural, featuring a child reading a book, was sponsored by the Fourth Avenue Coalition; no artist’s signature that I could see. Much to my surprise, the Antigone Bookstore was open in a limited way, allowing 15 people in the store with masks only. That may have changed last night when the Tucson City Council rescinded the citywide mask mandate.

4th Avenue Food for Everyone

A half a block up the street the food people begin to be present in the form of a Food Coop and several restaurants including the Drunken Chicken, Chocolate Iguana and Caruso’s Italian. While the Chocolate Iguana coffee house may have purple tables out front, Caruso’s has a full garden on one side. Caruso’s looks as if it has been there for decades, serving “pizza pie” while a Dean Martin song plays in the background.

Mid-street in front of the Chocolate Iguana is the SunLink street car station. Nice art! And the sign on the front of the street car read: Masks Required. It’s a Federal Law through September for all public transportation so even with the mask mandate gone in Tucson, it is still in effect on the SunLink. (More to come about the street car system in a future post.)

And then there is the gigantic tiki (Easter Island) figure in front of what appeared to be a tented collegiate night club. It looks like something you would have found in Ensenada or Rosarito decades ago. Fun for college kids! Which seems to be what 4th Avenue is mostly about.

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The Tucson City Council lifted the mask mandate on May 18, 2021. For 2 days there had been no deaths from Covid 19 in Pima County.