Last night, I finally decided to go and check out First Fridays. I headed out about 7:00, took I-17 to McDowell and that to Grand and headed toward Van Buren. I had looked online and seen that Grand is supposed to be one of the hot spots, so I figured I'd so mobs of people...and *crickets*...
It was pretty damn quiet aside from a few stragglers. Quite disappointed, I headed toward the Roosevelt St area and
that's where it got good. I parked the car on 3rd St and started walking the streets.
Both my girlfriend and myself were very pleasantly surprised. There were gobs of people on Roosevelt from Central to 7th St and also on 3rd plus a few of the other streets. We were pretty surprised by the quality of a lot of the art pieces throughout the galleries, as well as the galleries themselves. A break dancing group broke out and gathered a pretty large group of people which was great...felt like my recent trip to San Francisco where I saw something similar on the streets. Fate, and the new bar/nightclub they have going outside was packed and the music playing was good...definitely have to go again to hang out there for the night.
Overall, it felt a bit like Mill Ave mixed with a sort of swap meet/market. The energy was great and felt very organic. They could certainly use a good mix of buildings along all those streets to be able to showcase out of and bring some more bars/club/restaurants to the area. I'm not sure if there were more people then normal due to the Super Bowl being in town, but there were thousands of people out.
Definitely check it out if you haven't had a chance.
