The 56th annual Fourth Ave. Street Fair returns March 21-23, with food and art vendors, live music and other performances throughout the weekend.  

The fair runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, with around 350 food and art vendors setting up on the avenue. The street will be closed to vehicle traffic.

Local vendors  A Touch of Magic Bakery wool sell their sweets, Ducky’s Pineapple Banana Bread will have their air fried banana bread for sale and Bad Sissy Crochet is bringing its crochet works.

To sell merchandise all the item have to be handmade as Event Director Chelsea Szymanski explained in an interview 

The Street fair will have two stages set up for live music, one on Seventh Street and one on Fifth Street.

Inka Gold at a vendor stand selling clothing and CD’s at the Fourth Ave Spring Street Fair (Photo by Amelia Latham)

Thirty-one music artists will perform over the weekend including the rock band Znora, which closes out the Fifth Street stage from 4:45-6 p.m. Friday.  On Saturday you can find jazz and funk artist Erika D. Segura on the Seventh Street stage and country singer Mika Lynch plays the final set Sunday on the Fifth Street stage. 

Folk artist and University of Arizona freshman Erin Elizabeth, who goes by the stage name Lizzie, is performing at her second Fourth Avenue Street Fair on Friday. She plays the Seventh Street stage at 4:45 p.m.. 

“I think sometimes, as a solo artist, I get worried that I won’t meet the standards as a band might… So it felt really cool that Fourth Avenue values all different types of musicians and genres.” Lizzie said. 

Lizzie has played other Tucson events including the 2023 Tucson Folk Festival. She’s set to return that event April 4-6 at downtown’s Jácome Plaza. 

New to this year’s spring street fair: silent disco, which will run  all three days from 3-6 p.m. at the Antigone Books parking lot, 411 N. Fourth Ave. Tickets are $10 and can be bought at fourthavenue.org/4th-ave-silent-adventures 

The street fair has a temporary work program that hires around 60-80 people for the weekend. The workers include “people who are unhoused in the area” and high schoolers and others who don’t have jobs, said Laureen Blakemore, the public affairs and development manager for the Fourth Avenue Merchants Association. 

The association organizes the street fair in the spring and fall.  

Admission to the street fair is free, and there is free transportation on the SunLink streetcar. There also is  a shuttle at Pennington Street and Sixth Avenue that runs every 15 minutes from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and until  4:30 p.m. on Sunday. 

Arizona Sonoran News is a news service of the University of Arizona School of Journalism.