I don’t make it to Nob Hill as much as I used to, about once every three months it seems. That infrequency makes each sojourn there now a brand new adventure, as there are invariably new shops/restaurants and newly closed shops/restaurants. Finding my bearings is only made possible by landmark, long-time survivors, such as The Guild Cinema and Lari Nu Hati, the combo hair salon & wine bar.

Much current conventional wisdom for the highly transitory nature of shops along Central is the perceived evil of Albuquerque Rapid Transit and its deleterious impact on EVERYTHING, shops/restaurant survival included. A trip back through Google Streetview illustrates a different reality. Shops/restaurants have been opening and quickly closing along the corridor for years and years, including well before A.R.T. construction began.

One of these long-time “death sites” has been the space between the aforementioned Guild and Lari Nu Hati (north side of the 3400 block of Central). Let’s start a Streetview Retrospective with a photo from April 2019. Notably, “Pho 505,” shown below in vivid green, has closed since April. It won’t be the only store/restaurant…

The hullabaloo surrounding A.R.T. makes any such visual retrospective something of a statement about the bus project. What the photos above mean in this regard is, of course, “eye of the beholder” stuff.  Your humble blogster, big fan of A.R.T. as he is, sees the above and determines that running a successful shop/restaurant is hard, damn hard, anytime, anyplace, especially on the south side of the 3400 block of Central Avenue in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In fact, one almost wonders if shop/restaurant ownership isn’t really more of a boon to companies that design, build, and remodel shops/restaurants. These companies appear far more likely to have success, in the same way that funeral homes/mortuaries never seem to go out of business.

Have a great weekend, everybody. May the shop/restaurant you want to visit not be closed (or reopened as a place called “Loving Vegan”)!