21 & Over | University Way NE, The Ave — Nine blocks of cheap food and worse ideas

Every college town has one street that does the actual work, and in Seattle it is University Way NE. Nobody uses that name. It has been the Ave since the students of a much smaller university started saying it, and the shorthand outlasted the formality completely.

The film uses it the way students use it: as the corridor you end up on when the night stops going according to plan. Between roughly NE 42nd and NE 50th the street runs nine blocks of pho counters, teriyaki windows, a comic shop, secondhand bookstores, bubble tea, a cinema, and bars that check identification with varying enthusiasm. Rents are low enough that the tenants change constantly and high enough that the good ones do not last. It has been shabby for as long as anyone can remember, and the university's own students defend it fiercely on exactly those grounds.

The Ave is also where the film's premise actually lives. A twenty-first birthday in Washington State is the first legal drink, and this street is where most of the university's first legal drinks get bought, three blocks from the lecture hall.

Start at the north end near NE 50th and walk south with no plan. Somewhere around NE 45th the crowd thickens and the smell changes from bakery to grill smoke. That block, at eleven at night on a Friday, is the film's whole setting without a camera in sight.