Avenue 87

Avenue 87 is a street in the unnamed city of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It appears only in the novel's final section, during the climactic manhunt for Guy Montag after he has killed Captain Beatty and fled the burning of his own house. The avenue becomes the stage for a cynical piece of police theater: the authorities, having lost Montag's trail at the river, fabricate his capture by sending the Mechanical Hound after an innocent man walking alone on Avenue 87. The police helicopters converge on the street, the Hound leaps, and the victim is seized and killed on live television, allowing the announcer to declare that "Montag is dead" and that "a crime against society has been avenged." The camera deliberately avoids showing the victim's face in focus, scrambling the image just enough to let the audience's imagination fill in the identity. Granger, the leader of the book people, explains to Montag that the police had long had such solitary pedestrians "charted for months, years," knowing that information might prove useful for a "snap ending" when the real quarry escaped. Avenue 87 thus represents the city's willingness to sacrifice an innocent man to preserve the illusion of order and to satisfy the audience's demand for a quick, clean resolution to the chase. The street itself is never described in physical detail; its significance is entirely narrative and symbolic, marking the point where the state's machinery of surveillance and spectacle turns a random citizen into a scapegoat.