Fairview issues south of Newton St.

The four blocks of Fairview Avenue E. that are between E. Newton St. and Fairview Ave. N.) are unique in the city. Two great shipyards industriously uphold the legacy of the “working lake”, while cutting-edge biotech firms broaden its meaning. In recent decades this stretch of Fairview has with great success been made safer and more inviting for pedestrians through collaboration between the business and residential communities.

The quest for shoreline access and a walkway. The current generation may take the current shoreline access for granted. But for decades, few pedestrians could reach or even see Lake Union in the block between the two shipyards, obscured as it was by a jungle of blackberry, clematis, and ivy. A line of head-in parking jutted out into the roadway which there was the only place to walk—not a safe option in that industrial area with busy Fairview Avenue North just to the south.

The City-financed and Eastlake Community Council-led Eastlake Transportation Plan Eastlake Transportation Plan[/u] (1994; click here) determined that if the jungle were cut back, a public walkway was feasible, and had wide public support. Upland businesses saw value in a shoreline walkway, but maritime businesses initially were fearful of losing the public parking needed by their workers, contractors and the crews of the ships in for repair. They were won over by commitments from the community to preserve their parking, and by UW architecture professor and local resident Jim Donnette’s drawings (featured in the 1994 Plan) that optimized the Fairview right-of-way so as add a four-block walkway and actually increase the number of public parking spaces.

At this point, a fortuitous opportunity for City financial involvement arose, dramatizing the value of a plan being in place with consensus behind it. The Seattle Public Utilities Department (SPU) was about to begin a construction project to expand the huge combined sewer main line that runs through the neighborhood. To settle an environmental appeal by ECC regarding the project’s impacts, SPU and ECC had previously reached a written agreement including a pledge not to use this Fairview right-of-way for construction staging. When in late 1996 SPU decided that it needed to after all, SPU accepted ECC’s condition for changing the agreement, which was that the City install in the two blocks between Newton and Blaine streets part of the landscaped walkway and optimized parking called for by the 1994 Eastlake Transportation Plan.

The neighborhood was at this moment preparing to develop the Eastlake Neighborhood Plan under a contract with the City’s Neighborhood Planning Office. To develop a design for approval by the Seattle Department of Transportation and construction by SPU’s contractors, John Crowser, a property and business owner in the area, convened a stakeholder group of property owners, businesses, and residents who met nine times, another time with City officials, and also participated in several public meetings and a tour. APU donated a topographic and land survey, and technical assistance was donated by UW graduate design students and by other volunteer professionals. Agreement was reached, and SPU went ahead with its sewer expansion project through the neighborhood. According to the plans agreed to with the neighborhood, SPU’s contractors subsequently constructed the landscaped walkway and optimized parking that we see and enjoy today.

Extension of the public walkway south from E. Blaine St.

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The intersection of Fairview Ave. E. and Fairview Ave. N. For decades, possibly the most dangerous intersection in the Eastlake neighborhood was at the very south end where, in a vast paved area, Fairview Avenue E. intersected with Fairview Avenue N. Pedestrians and cyclists had no clearly safe place to turn or cross, as northbound motorists came from different directions in their sweeping turns. The 1994 Eastlake Transportation Plan included a reconfiguration design donated by the nearby biotech company ZymoGenetics, and the Mayor and City Council’s 1999 adoption of the Eastlake Neighborhood Plan identified redesign of the intersection as a high priority.

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Flooding. On February 2, 2016, the Eastlake Community Council wrote to City officials (click here for the letter) urging a solution to increasing flooding that each year blocks the public pathway and public parking on a segment of the Fairview Avenue East right-of-way between E. Blaine St. and E. Newton St. Click here for a video of schoolchildren and their teachers walking in the street because flooding has blocked the pathway.

Although not as dramatic, flooding also blocks pedestrians who try to walk on some parts of the nine blocks of Fairview Avenue East between Newton St. and Fuhrman Avenue East. The Fairview Green Street design concept plan proposes drainage improvements and other measures to assure that pedestrians can walk safely there. For details, see the page on this web site entitled “Toward a Safer Fairview”.