Mill Avenue isn’t what it used to be. The nostalgic zeitgeist of my youth is slowly being swallowed up by development and corporate greed—but these are the sacrifices that communities make to keep their edges. There is still a great deal to it worth visiting.

I used to spend hot, dark nights on the street listening to the idle tales of travelers, street rats, drunken college students who stumbled from bars and night clubs during the school year. They hold art fairs there, events to bring people dancing in the street, and there’s a lot of shops that still hold those old qualities. Like Graffiti Shop, with an entrance ensconced within a building’s courtyard surmounted with a gazebo and falling water.

I grew up on the Ave.

It was a place for me to find community, people who weren’t just college kids going to ASU. People who had long-and-far to come from in various locations around the valley, and then there were the nomads who just came and went. We have places like Coffee Plantation and the End of Mill to sit around and act almost-posh; and at the end of the week there’s the Mill Avenue Drum Circle, which gathers a riot of worthy stories bundled in weathered smiles.

I write Mill Ave Vexations, a serial-novella and ‘zine set on Mill Ave to give back to the community that gave so much to me.