If you skipped Route 66 Summerfest this July, you probably assume you missed the big night of Nob Hill's centennial year. That's a reasonable guess. It's also the wrong one.
The mile of Central Avenue between Girard and Washington closed at midnight on Friday, July 17, and didn't reopen until 3 a.m. Sunday, July 19, roughly 51 hours later. During that window, the city turned that stretch into a themed festival: four stages running music by decade, about 100 show cars parked end to end, 14 food trucks, 30 artisan vendors, and a headlining set from The Docksiders Yacht Rock Experience closing out the night. Then Central reopened for regular traffic and the barricades came down, more than two weeks ago now.
That's usually where coverage of a centennial event ends. But Route 66 didn't turn 100 in July. It turns 100 on November 11, the date the highway was originally established back in 1926. Summerfest was the biggest single night on Nob Hill's calendar this year, but it was never the anniversary itself, just the loudest way to mark getting close to it. The quieter stretch between now and then is arguably the better window for anyone who actually lives here, because the parts of the centennial worth paying attention to were never the ones that required a street closure.
What Didn't Leave With the Barricades
Walk Central on a Tuesday night in August and you'll find the same things that were there before Summerfest, and the same things that'll still be there after November 11. The neon still runs every evening: the De Anza Motor Lodge sign, the Hiland Theater marquee, People's Flower Shop, the Lobo Theatre, and the sign on the Nob Hill Business Center itself, all lighting up along the same stretch the festival closed for one weekend.
That last building deserves a second look, because it's not just decoration. R.B. Waggoman built the Nob Hill Business Center in 1947 as the first shopping center in the state, and its signature innovation at the time wasn't the shops inside but the off-street parking lot, built for a growing number of shoppers arriving by car instead of streetcar. Nearly eighty years later, the building is still doing the same job: local shops, no dramatic renovation required, no event calendar necessary to justify the visit.
The same goes for the stretch of vintage shopping that doesn't need a festival banner to draw people in. Vintage Vault, Octopus Banana, Antiques & Things, and Avengers Vintage sit within a couple of blocks of each other, and if you're chasing sound over clothing, Nob Hill Music and Longhair Records cover that too. None of these depend on the centennial. They were the neighborhood before Route 66 turned 100, and they'll be the neighborhood after.
A Trolley Still Stops Inside the Neighborhood
Where the centennial calendar does add something new, it's mostly quieter than Summerfest and easier to fit into an actual week. ABQ Trolley Co. runs a Route 66 Speakeasy Tour that departs from the Old Town Emporium and runs about three and a half hours, with one of its three stops tucked inside Hotel Zazz, right in the heart of Nob Hill. It's a small, low-fidelity room built around cocktails and vinyl, not a pop-up built for the anniversary, but its Prohibition-era theme fits the year without demanding a street closure to pull off.
The company also launched a separate tour built specifically for the centennial. Route 66 Remixed pairs a narrated trolley ride with a phone-based augmented reality layer, so pointing a camera at certain murals downtown brings up animated scenes tied to the highway's history. "Anytime you're celebrating 100 years of something is worth celebrating, I think," Tour ABQ's Jesse Herron told KOB, which is a fair way to describe a year that's mixed one enormous street party with a handful of smaller, ongoing additions most residents can work into a regular Saturday.
Nob Hill's own contribution to that ongoing layer sits on the windows and walls of the Guild Cinema, where centennial art has been going up gradually since earlier this year, alongside similar installations at the El Rey and the Rosenwald downtown. It's the kind of thing you notice on a walk to get coffee, not something you plan a trip around.
The Actual Birthday Hasn't Happened Yet
Here's the part that gets lost when a single festival soaks up most of the coverage: Nob Hill's centennial calendar didn't start with Summerfest and it doesn't end with it either. The neighborhood rang in this centennial year on New Year's Eve with a chile drop, encouraging people to shop and dine at local businesses on their way into 2026. Summerfest landed roughly six and a half months later as the midpoint, not the finale.
The finale, at least on paper, is November 11, the date the New Mexico Route 66 Association marks as the highway's official 100th birthday. Albuquerque is still working out what that day looks like. AFAR reported in the spring that the city was planning a "centennial inauguration" for November 11 without yet announcing specifics, which means the marquee date on this whole calendar is still an open question three months out, while the smaller, ongoing pieces, the trolley stop, the neon, the murals on the Guild Cinema, keep running in the background with no ticket required.
That's worth sitting with if you live here. The version of the centennial that got a road closure, a headline slot for a yacht rock cover band, and coverage from every local news station already happened and is done. The version still ahead of us is unannounced, likely smaller in scale, and tied to a date that actually means something historically rather than a date that worked for booking a stage. In between, the neighborhood just keeps doing what it does: M'Tucci's Bar Roma still serving dinner out of a converted Art Deco service station, the record shops still open, the neon still running every night whether or not anyone's watching for it.
Central Avenue didn't need to stay closed for any of that to matter. It just needed to reopen so the rest of the year could catch up.
If you're already settled into Nob Hill and simply enjoy watching how the neighborhood carries its history, that's the whole point of paying attention to a year like this one. But if you're weighing whether a stretch like this, with its neon, its walkable shopping, and its habit of turning history into daily life, is the right fit for your next move, House of Homes NM knows this street block by block. Let's Talk About Your Next Move.
