Walk down Lakeside Avenue on a warm Thursday right now and it looks the way it should. Kids on the seawall. A line at the door of BluWater Bistro. Someone loading a paper bag of Leschi Market groceries into a car parked in a spot that, three months ago, was fenced off behind orange plastic.
This is the interlude. It ends in a couple of weeks.
The August window, and why it matters
The South Leschi Marina rehabilitation project, a roughly $7.913 million effort to remove creosote-treated piles, install a floating breakwater, and add a pump-out station and public-access improvements, restarted in April, hit the neighborhood harder than anyone expected, and then stopped. The city began reopening parking spaces the weekend of May 10, construction paused May 15, and work is expected to resume in late August or early September. Breakwater and moorage construction is expected to begin in fall 2026.
Translation for anyone who lives here: you have a few weeks. Then Harkness Construction comes back, the parking lots south of Leschi Market close again, and the water-facing block of Lakeside Avenue enters a phase that will run into next year.
If you have been putting off dinner at the marina, a swim at the park, or a Sunday walk down to the boathouse, this is the month.
What actually got taken away, and what came back
The scale of the May shutdown is worth understanding, because it tells you exactly what to expect when construction resumes. The two public parking lots across from Leschi Market, located south of BluWater Bistro and next to the Leschi South Marina, were closed off along with street parking impacts on Lakeside Avenue, while the project reduced Lakeside Avenue to a single lane during portions of the work. That is roughly 140 parking spaces during summer, plus several of the only 10 spaces directly in front of Leschi Market.
For a business district that is essentially two blocks long, removing 140 spaces is not a nuisance. It is the whole parking supply.
Fourth-generation Leschi Market owner Yousef Shulman put the stakes plainly:
"This was not just an inconvenience. For a small neighborhood business, losing access means losing sales."
Community response was unusual. According to the market, the City received over 900 emails regarding the impact on Leschi Market and surrounding businesses. That volume, from a neighborhood this size, is what got the pause. When the project resumes, the fences will look familiar, but the working assumption from city officials is that access will be better coordinated the second time around. Business owners have been clear they want a written schedule before crews return.
A short walk from 100 to 200 Lakeside
Here is what is open right now, roughly in the order you would pass it walking south from the marina.
| Where | What it is | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Daniel's Broiler – Leschi | Steakhouse, 200 Lake Washington Blvd | Built inside a converted 1919 boathouse, with a 30-foot main dining room window framing views of the Cascades and Mount Rainier. Happy hour runs 3 to 5 p.m. daily, excluding holidays. |
| BluWater Bistro | American, 102 Lakeside Ave | Opened at this location on March 13, 2004, replacing the former Leschi Lake Cafe. The patio is the reason to go. |
| Leschi Market | Grocery, 103 Lakeside Ave | Family-owned since 1948, with a wine aisle locals genuinely rate against downtown shops and a butcher counter that draws people from outside the neighborhood. |
| Meet the Moon | Cafe and bar | The newest arrival on this stretch, and the one out-of-neighborhood visitors keep asking about. |
| Reckless Noodle House, Vendemmia | Vietnamese and Italian, up the hill | Both consistently show up on updated Leschi restaurant lists alongside BluWater and Daniel's. |
A few things this table cannot show. BluWater is the last of its kind. It is the last remaining location of a small chain that once operated in Green Lake, South Lake Union, and Kirkland. Its owner Bart Evans spent the week of the shutdown, bringing the construction crews energy drinks and offering up free lunch, which is a piece of context worth carrying into any conversation about how this place actually works.
Leschi Market's role is harder to describe until you have lived here for a while. It is a grocery store, but it is also the neighborhood's default meeting spot, wine store, and, on some weekends, the closest thing to a butcher shop east of the Central District. Business owners had known about the marina rehabilitation project for nearly nine years. The community response to May's shutdown, all 900 emails of it, is what happens when a store like that gets threatened.
What summer looks like away from Lakeside
If you would rather spend the rest of the season out of the construction zone, a couple of options are worth putting on the calendar.
The Madrona Farmers Market is a short walk or drive from Leschi. It runs every Friday from 3 to 7 p.m. now through October in the parking lot of Grocery Outlet at 1126 MLK Jr. Way, with fresh produce, flowers, line-caught fish, local meat, cheese, eggs, baked goods, and frozen treats. It is small enough that you learn the vendors' names by August.
The lakefront itself does not require the marina to work. Leschi Park's swimming beach has lifeguards on duty during summer, along with the jogging path and picnic areas that run along the shoreline. This is where most residents actually spend hot afternoons, and none of it is affected by the marina project.
If you want something with a date attached, the Leschi Community Council keeps an events calendar that runs through the summer, including its recurring board meetings and shoreline discussions. It is also the group that has been closest to the marina negotiations, and their updates are more useful than the city project page if you want to know what is actually happening on the ground.
Reading the marina project as a neighbor, not a headline
A quick word on framing, because the coverage of this project has been loud.
The reason the marina work is happening at all is that the existing structures are past their useful life. The plan is to remove the existing timber pier and floating dock, which are supported by creosote-treated piles and are nearing the end of their useful life, along with the pipe pile breakwater, which the city says does not adequately protect the marina from wave action. A new breakwater with a boat sewage pump-out facility, and boat moorage with public access, will be floated with benches and a kayak rack. The marina currently has no transient moorage or pump-out facility and is not accessible.
When it is finished, the waterfront gains a functional transient dock, cleaner lake bottom, and public access improvements it has never had. That is a genuinely good outcome for a two-block district that trades almost entirely on the water.
Getting from here to there is going to be uncomfortable. The renovation project is expected to last three months, consuming nearly the entire summer season once it resumes, and Evans has been public that May through August is when his restaurant can do half its annual revenue. The fall 2026 breakwater phase adds more months on top of that.
The interlude ends soon. Use it.
A short list, if you only have a few weekends left
- Dinner at BluWater with the patio open, before parking access changes again.
- Happy hour at Daniel's Broiler with the 30-foot window doing its work in evening light.
- A Saturday morning at Leschi Market that ends with something from the wine aisle you would not have picked yourself.
- A Friday afternoon at the Madrona Farmers Market, then back to Leschi Park before the beach empties out.
- One walk down Lakeside without a plan, just to see the water without a fence in front of it.
None of this is a real estate pitch. It is a neighborhood field guide, written by the team that pays attention to Leschi the rest of the year too. If a move within the neighborhood, or into it, is on your horizon this fall or next, Exact Home Team has been tracking the Leschi market block by block for close to two decades. When you are ready to talk, we are ready to listen.
