For three years, the storefront across from Woodland Park Zoo's west entrance sat empty, then got torn down, then rose back up as a five-story building with cranes and scaffolding blocking the view of the elephants. If you walked or drove past 5821 Phinney Ave N between 2023 and this year, you knew the space by what used to be there: a little pie shop with a glassed-in kitchen where you could watch the bakers work, where regulars proposed to their partners over a slice of Blue Hawaiian, where owner Chris Porter refused to sell leftover pie the next day and gave it away to whoever was walking by at closing time instead.
That shop, A la Mode Pies, is coming back. Porter is aiming for a November reopening at 5819 Phinney Ave N, Suite 1, just a few doors from the original address, though he's told local outlets that permitting and construction could push it into December. What makes this more than a simple reopening is who holds the deed. Porter isn't renting the space this time. He owns it.
The Corner That Wouldn't Let Him Go
The original building closed in 2023 because its owner donated the aging property to Homestead Community Land Trust, which needed to demolish it to build something bigger. What replaced it is Woodland View, a five-story building with 19 permanently affordable condos for first-time buyers earning up to 80 percent of area median income, priced from $247,000 for a one-bedroom, plus six market-rate units, all sharing a rooftop deck with views of Woodland Park and the Olympics. The land itself was a gift from architect Chakorn Phisuthikul and former schoolteacher Marilyn Heinemann, given specifically so modest-income workers could buy into the neighborhood.
Most small business owners who lose a lease to a redevelopment project don't get invited back. Porter did, and before the building was even finished. He recalled the land trust telling him plainly why:
"They basically said, 'You're kind of an institution on this corner, and the community has embraced you. The only way we see this being redeveloped is if you are involved and agree to come back.'"
So instead of leasing ground-floor retail to whoever bid highest, the developer built the deal around bringing back the business that was already there, this time with Porter as owner of the commercial condo rather than a tenant paying rent to someone else. That's a different kind of continuity than most Seattle neighborhoods get when a building comes down. The corner didn't lose its identity to redevelopment. It negotiated for it.
While the buildout finishes, Porter has kept the name in front of Phinney Ridge the old-fashioned way: pie in hand. He popped up at Flying Bike Brewery on Greenwood Avenue this past Saturday, September 19, selling whole pies including French apple, summer peach, and a new Wildberry flavor to a neighborhood that has spent three years buying its A la Mode fix in Ballard or West Seattle instead. Thanksgiving pre-ordering opens October 1, regardless of whether the storefront itself is ready, because Porter has said the holiday is the one time of year a pie shop meets almost everyone in the neighborhood at once.
Everything Else Landing on the Same Three Blocks
The pie shop's return isn't happening in isolation. Look at what else has moved onto or is about to move onto this same short stretch of Phinney and Greenwood Avenues this year:
- Stevie's Famous Pizza, recognized by the Seattle Times, Seattle Met, The Infatuation, and Eater Seattle, opened its third location on August 2 at 6000 Phinney Ave N, taking over the old Zeek's Pizza space. It's the pizzeria's first location north of downtown Seattle after building a following in Burien and inside Beacon Hill's Clock-Out Lounge, and it's the largest restaurant the founders have built to date.
- The Phinney Farmers Market is closing its regular Saturday season and shifting its Harvest Market into an evening format this year: Friday, November 20, from 3 to 7 p.m., with string lights and live music instead of the usual daytime produce stalls.
- Woodland Park Zoo's WildLanterns, presented this year by Kaiser Permanente, opens November 13 and runs nightly through January 17, folding in lantern versions of red pandas and tree kangaroos to promote Forest Trailhead, the zoo's newest exhibit, which actually opened back in May.
Line those dates up and something clicks. The farmers market's lit evening send-off on November 20 lands one week after WildLanterns opens across the street on November 13. For about a week, and really for the whole season after, the same three blocks of Phinney Avenue have string lights on one side of the street and lantern-lit trails on the other. Two separate institutions, a produce market and a zoo, made scheduling choices independently that turned this stretch of sidewalk into the neighborhood's brightest corner for two straight months, right as A la Mode's ovens are supposed to be warming back up a few doors down.
None of this reads like coincidence once you notice who's driving it. The Phinney Neighborhood Association has spent 2026 building formal support for exactly this kind of momentum. Starting in March, it began mailing petitions to property owners along Phinney and Greenwood Avenues, proposing a business improvement area that would fund sidewalk cleaning, lighting, and coordinated events for the commercial corridor between the 7-Eleven at 59th and Phinney and North 90th Street on Greenwood. It's a formal mechanism for a pattern that was already showing up informally. Favorite Day Media, the marketing agency that's helped a wave of PhinneyWood businesses with their branding over the past six years, was started by Phinney Ridge resident Chad Frerichs, who began by sitting down with struggling local shop owners for free during the pandemic. He still lives here. His business has grown well beyond the neighborhood, and he's said he has no intention of growing away from it.
A Corridor That Keeps Choosing Its Own
The easy version of this story is "small business returns, neighborhood adds a pizza place, market throws a party." The more useful version, if you actually live here, is that Phinney Ridge's commercial strip isn't filling vacancies with whoever shows up first. A land trust built its affordable housing deal around getting a beloved baker back on the payroll instead of collecting market rent from a stranger. A pizzeria with three Seattle Times mentions chose this specific corridor for its biggest expansion, not Ballard, not Greenwood proper, not Fremont. And the people organizing the corridor's next phase, the BIA petition, the marketing help, are the same people who've had storefronts or lived on these blocks for years.
That's a different story than the one you'd get from a listicle of "what's new in Phinney Ridge." It's not that things are changing here. It's that the people already rooted in this neighborhood keep being the ones who decide what changes.
If you've watched this corner from your porch for the last three years and you're curious what a stretch of Phinney Avenue with this much staying power might mean for your own home's value, or you're weighing whether now is the moment to make a move of your own, Mark Ashmun knows this neighborhood block by block and is happy to talk through what it looks like from where you sit. Request a free home valuation whenever you're ready.
