Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Two blocks down on the left is the Jupiter Hotel and Doug Fir Lounge,
a boutique hotel with attached 300-capacity live-music venue, bar, and
restaurant whose design set (or at least embraced) all kinds of trends
when it opened in 2004. The upstairs restaurant-bar is what you might
imagine every building in Aspen or Vail will look like in the future: rus-
tic but glittery, simultaneously posh and woodsy. The restrooms are
paneled in gold-veined mirror—totally disorienting, but kind of fab-
ulous. Downstairs, the music venue leans more toward the log-cabin
feel, and regardless of your feelings about the Doug Fir as a whole, it's a
great place to see bands you love: everyone sounds fantastic here. The
attached Jupiter Hotel works a sort of
Jetsons
-IKEA minimalist design
into a 1960s motor-inn shape, and the small art gallery in its front office
has interesting exhibits that change monthly. Across the street, and in
the next block, is a strip of funky little vintage-clothing shops, novelty
shops, and galleries well worth poking around in.
In the next block you'll find one of the most talked-about restaurants in
a much-talked-about restaurant scene: the always-packed Le Pigeon,
run by James Beard Award-winning chef Gabriel Rucker. It's a beauti-
ful, smallish space with an open kitchen and a meat-heavy dinner menu.
Continue down Burnside past a string of appealingly rock-and-roll bars
to NE 6th Ave. Turn right on 6th, then left on NE Couch St. At the
corner of Couch and NE Grand Ave. you'll find Stark's Vacuum Mu-
seum, a strange little space inside a retail vacuum-cleaner
store—basically a hallway where some 300 models of vacuums from
various points in history (starting in the 1800s) are stored. It's free to go
in, have a look, and count your blessings.
Go one block farther along NE Couch, then turn left onto NE Martin
Luther King Jr. Blvd. for a block. Cross the street and turn right to
walk along E. Burnside St., just underneath the bridge ramp. Here,
tucked under the east end of the bridge, is the Burnside Skatepark, gen-
erally considered one of the best skate parks in the country and—even if
you're not into skating—an inspiring community project.
Before about 1990, underneath the Burnside Bridge was not a place
you'd ever want to go. But a handful of skater kids started reclaiming
the area, gradually adding to the empty concrete square until it became
the enclosed park it is now. This took over a decade, and the feat of the
park's construction is amazing in itself, but the real victory is that
