Fairmount Village, San Diego, CA

Fairmount Village holds the civic center of San Diego's City Heights. Sol Price paid for a redevelopment here in the 1990s, building a planned urban village around a police substation that opened in 1996, and the schools, library and community buildings that followed still define the neighborhood's western edge. It runs south of University from Fairmount Avenue east toward Euclid. That civic core gets daily use. The City Heights/Weingart Branch Library and the City Heights Performance Annex share a building on Fairmount, and Officer Jeremy Henwood Memorial Park covers 3.6 acres on Wightman Street. Farther east, the 47th Street canyon, known locally as Olivia Canyon, is set aside as open space with a trail. On Saturday mornings the City Heights Farmers Market fills Wightman just across Fairmount. Homes in Fairmount Village are a mix of apartment complexes and older houses on small lots. Much of the housing is multifamily and closely spaced, which is common across City Heights. University Avenue is the eating street. Red Sea Ethiopian, which opened in the 1980s and is often called the oldest Ethiopian restaurant in San Diego, still serves coffee with a table-side ceremony. Taco shops and fruit bars fill the storefronts along the rest of the avenue. Errands are close. El Super, at University and Fairmount, is the main grocery, and the shopping center around it has a bank of quick-service chains. Local buses run University, and the Centerline station on State Route 15 at University is a short ride west. The trade is noise and density. University and Fairmount are both heavy traffic streets, and the blocks along them are rarely calm. But walk two minutes off the avenue and you can reach a library, a real park and a canyon trail without getting in a car, which few neighborhoods this dense can offer.