Walk or bike the Burke-Gilman Trail west from Gas Works Park and you'll pass a stretch of chain-link that doesn't match anything else on that shoreline. Boathouses, kayak racks, a scattering of small public docks, all built to get people to the water. Then a fence, a restricted-area sign, and if you look through the gaps, a patrol boat tied up where a public access point used to be. Most people walking past assume it's Coast Guard property, or something else permanent and official. It isn't. It's Waterway 20, one of nine public waterways along Wallingford's stretch of Lake Union, and it's been closed to the public since 2015 for a reason most neighbors have never actually heard explained.
The short version: the Seattle Police Harbor Patrol expanded its dock fence that year to enclose the waterway, folding a public access point into its own operating footprint. The land itself never stopped being public. The Washington State Department of Natural Resources owns it and always has. But state ownership on paper hasn't meant public access on the ground for over a decade.
Nine Waterways, and One Went Missing
Lake Union's north shore once had 23 public waterways. Eighteen remain open today. Nine of those eighteen run through Wallingford, numbered 15 through 23, stretching along the shoreline from the Aurora Bridge toward the University District line. Most residents who paddle or kayak know the Gas Works boat launch and a couple of street-end access points without ever hearing the numbering system behind them, because the numbers only start to matter when one of them disappears.
That nearly happened to Waterway 23 too, a few years back, until the Wallingford Community Council negotiated an access agreement with the Lake Washington Rowing Club to keep it open to the public. Waterway 20 got the opposite outcome. No agreement, a fence, and ten years of the issue sitting exactly where it started.
What Actually Changed in 2026
Two things moved this year that hadn't moved in the previous ten. First, an environmental review of the site turned up contamination, some of it tied to materials the harbor patrol had stored there, which reclassified the fence from a neighborhood grievance into an actual cleanup project with defined scope. Second, and this is the part that tends to break these standoffs, the Wallingford Community Council secured a two-year grant from the Washington State Department of Ecology, running 2026 through 2028, earmarked specifically for assessing and remediating that contamination. A ten-year argument with no deadline is easy for a city to leave alone. A funded project with an end date is not.
The council's Shoreline and Waterways Committee, chaired by Ted Hunter, ran two public meetings this spring to walk neighbors through what the grant actually covers. The first, on April 8 at Gasworks Brewing, brought in a consultant from Shannon and Wilson, Inc. to present early findings on soil conditions. The second, on May 26 at Ivar's Salmon House, covered an update from the Department of Ecology on the remediation timeline. On June 14, the council's annual Waterway Walk, a guided tour of the nine north-shore waterways that starts at the Wallingford Steps, stopped at Waterway 20 for the first time in years with something concrete to report instead of the same open question.
This isn't the first time a stretch of this exact shoreline changed through sustained neighborhood pressure rather than city initiative. In 1971, more than a thousand people hiked an abandoned rail corridor along Lake Union to argue for what eventually became the Burke-Gilman Trail, with Gas Works Park as one of the original starting points. The trail opened in 1978. This September 12, Cascade Bicycle Club and the Seattle Parks Foundation are marking the 55th anniversary of that hike-in with a ride from Gas Works Park to Matthews Beach Park. The playbook for Waterway 20 looks a lot like the one that worked the first time: show up, keep showing up, and eventually the paperwork catches up to the persistence.
The Same Kind of Persistence Shows Up Elsewhere in the Neighborhood
None of this is run by one civic-minded superhero. It's a pattern of small volunteer groups in Wallingford that keep doing the unglamorous, repetitive work until something gives. The Wallingford Community Council tracks zoning maps and shoreline permits over years, not news cycles. The St. Benedict Parent Club has run the Great Wallingford Bratwurst Festival for more than 40 years, the same weekend every fall, with the same folding tables and the same grills, because that consistency is what keeps a fundraiser solvent for four decades. Different organizations, same underlying habit: nobody's waiting for a viral moment. They're just still there next year.
What's Actually on the Calendar This September
| Event | When | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Wallingford Farmers Market | Wednesdays, 3 to 7 pm, through September 30 | Meridian Park, Meridian Ave N & N 50th St |
| Great Wallingford Bratwurst Festival | Friday, Sept 18 (4 to 10 pm) & Saturday, Sept 19 (10 am to 10 pm) | St. Benedict School, 4811 Wallingford Ave N |
The farmers market has a few Wednesdays left before it closes out the season on September 30. It's been recognized by the Washington State Farmers Markets Association as one of the better markets in the state, and the setup at Meridian Park makes it easy to see why: produce and prepared food stalls, buskers, a playground for kids to burn off energy, and the P-Patch garden at the Good Shepherd Center a short walk away for anyone who wants to see where some of that produce might have come from.
The Bratwurst Festival is the bigger event on the calendar and the one that closes out summer for a lot of the neighborhood. Two days of bratwurst, hamburgers, pretzels, and music at St. Benedict School, with proceeds going directly to the school. Forty-plus years in, it's less a festival that happens to be in Wallingford and more a fixture the neighborhood's fall rhythm is built around.
What Comes Next for the Shoreline
The Waterway 20 grant runs through 2028, and remediation work is ongoing under the Department of Ecology's oversight. No reopening date has been set. What's different from the previous decade is that there's now a funded process with milestones instead of a fence and a shrug. The Wallingford Community Council posts updates on its shorelines page as the cleanup progresses, and the next Waterway Walk will likely be the easiest way to see the site's status in person rather than through a chain-link gap.
For a neighborhood that gets summed up in real estate copy as walkable and lake-adjacent, this is the part that copy usually skips: walkable and lake-adjacent only means something if the water is actually reachable, and in this one spot, for this one decade, it hasn't been. That it's finally moving is a small piece of infrastructure news. For the people who kayak, walk the Burke-Gilman daily, or just want the fence explained, it's the neighborhood story worth knowing before the next Waterway Walk makes it common knowledge anyway.
If you're weighing a move to Wallingford, or already live here and are curious what a home on these blocks is actually worth in today's market, Mark Ashmun can walk you through it. Request a free home valuation and get a straight answer grounded in the same kind of local detail as everything above.
