Interesting to see what Seattle has done. Perhaps San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf could take a cue from Seattle and transform the Wharf to something other than shlocky t-shirt shops and shuttered, dilapidated, legacy restaurants.
Continuing the F-Line through the existing tunnel to Fort Mason would seem to be a no-brainer.
After demolishing an elevated highway and digging a $3 billion tunnel, the Pacific Northwest’s largest city is eager to show off its “new front door.”
By James S. Russell
November 7, 2025 at 5:00 AM PST
Toddlers crawling up a rope ladder inside a wooden jellyfish were among the Seattleites who celebrated the grand opening of its long-awaited Waterfront Park on Sept. 6. The 25-foot-high play structure is part of an aquatic-themed playground for the new park — one of the largest and most logistically challenging public projects in the US.
Transforming this 1.2-mile stretch along Elliott Bay took 15 years and required the replacement of a crumbling seawall and the demolition of an earthquake-damaged highway viaduct. It cost more than $800 million, not counting the $3.3 billion it took to dig a two-mile highway tunnel for the traffic the viaduct once carried.
Thousands of trees, native flowering plants, grasses and shrubs have been planted, but the word park is not really an adequate descriptor. It’s a combination of public esplanade and multimodal neighborhood connector that’s at once a cultural destination, a stage for Indigenous art and an exercise in habitat restoration. Sited in front of the the city’s commercial core, which rises steeply from the water’s edge, the development also accommodates a set of very urban elements, including a busy new ferry terminal, a 1970s aquarium and an assortment of other tourist attractions. (The only patch of grass is artificial.)
The project, which won the Outstanding New Park Project Award from World Urban Parks on Oct. 27, is one of a series of vast public capital investments that are starting to bear fruit. The city embarked on some of these projects more than a decade ago, as the region’s technology industry boomed. That wealth helped metro Seattle extend its light rail network across three counties (with an important second line soon to finish) and launch a multi-year $5 billion airport upgrade.
Times are tougher now. Like many other West Coast cities, Seattle was rattled by high-profile struggles with crime and homelessness during Covid, and roughly a third of downtown office space is still vacant. Marquee companies like Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, Zillow and Redfin are cutting jobs; longtime anchor employer Boeing has seen its brand damaged by catastrophic quality lapses. Deep-blue Seattle has also been a target of hostile rhetoric from President Donald Trump, and his administration’s cuts to biotech and health research are kneecapping what had been a fast-growing life sciences and global health cluster.
Waterfront Park is thus making its debut in a city eager for a win. When it began opening in stages over the last year, Seattleites swarmed the space, dodging construction fences and heavy equipment to check out the progress. Now much rides on its success.
Can a Waterfront Park Wake Up Downtown Seattle?
Greg