Ask anyone in Wedgwood where the neighborhood's center is, and they will point to NE 85th Street, the intersection with the shuttered QFC, the empty Rite Aid, and the Wedgwood Broiler that has been serving London Broil since 1965. That is where the community council holds its redevelopment meetings. That is where the design review board has spent three years arguing over curb cuts. That is where everyone's attention has been fixed since 2022.
But walk three blocks south to NE 75th Street on any given evening and you will find the version of Wedgwood that actually functions. Safeway anchors one corner. Grand Central Bakery & Cafe, Sophie's Tacos, Veraci Pizza, and Not Just Fish & Chips fill in around it. This intersection has kept its grocery store throughout. The 85th Street project has been in motion since 2022, and over those same four years the 75th Street corner has stayed open and steady.
That split is the real story of Wedgwood in 2026, and it explains a lot about how a neighborhood's daily life can drift away from its official center without anyone deciding to move it.
The corner that keeps almost getting a grocery store
The QFC at 35th and 85th closed in April 2021, and the site has been empty ever since. In 2022, Security Properties put the parcel under contract and began the long process of designing a mixed-use replacement with an anchor grocer on the ground floor and apartments above. For a while it looked doomed. An October 2024 design review meeting rejected most of the developer's requested departures, including the curb cut off 35th Avenue that the project needed to function, and one member of the Security Properties team reportedly told the Wedgwood Community Council the ruling had killed the grocery plan.
Then it recovered. On September 29, 2025, the Northeast Design Review Board unanimously approved a revised design. Town & Country Markets' president told the board directly that his company wanted to open a store in Wedgwood. The Wedgwood Community Council posted the news under the headline that grocery was returning to the neighborhood.
Three months later, it wasn't. On January 5, 2026, the council reported that Security Properties had walked away, unable to find an investment partner to close the deal, while the property owner had grown tired of waiting and relisted the site. Nobody involved was described as being at fault. It was, as the council put it, a business decision between two private parties responding to a difficult financing environment. The property is back on the market as of this writing, and the site plan that already cleared design review is reportedly transferable to whoever buys it next.
Directly across the street sits the second half of the problem: the Rite Aid that closed in July 2025 and has stood empty since, still owned separately from the shopping center parcel and still being marketed for lease with no public update on its future. Some in the neighborhood have floated the idea that a grocer might land there instead, since it already has a parking lot the Wedgwood Center project would have needed to build from scratch. Nothing has been confirmed. For now, both corners of the historic shopping district sit vacant, and the businesses that remain, including the Wedgwood Broiler and the newly acquired Mechanics Bank branch, are operating without a firm sense of how long they have left in the buildings they're in.
Three blocks south, nobody's waiting
None of that uncertainty touches NE 75th Street. That intersection carries the neighborhood's actual grocery traffic, its lunch crowd, and its errand-running, and it has done so without a design review meeting or a community council dashboard tracking its fate. Grand Central Bakery & Cafe, Sophie's Tacos, Veraci Pizza, Not Just Fish & Chips, and a Subway location fill out the corner around Safeway. It is not glamorous. It is not the subject of a multi-year redevelopment saga. It is just where the actual foot traffic in Wedgwood already lives, whether or not the 85th Street project ever gets resolved.
The contrast is worth sitting with. Wedgwood's business district, as the Wedgwood Community Council has documented, runs as a long line along 35th Avenue NE with three cross streets: 95th, 85th, and 75th. Only one of those three nodes has spent the last four years in limbo. The other two, 75th and to a lesser extent 95th, have simply continued operating.
The small stuff filling in near 85th anyway
Even with the anchor project stalled, the blocks around 85th haven't gone entirely still. A new bookstore, Lovestruck in Seattle, opened at 8507 35th Ave NE in October 2025, filling a storefront that had sat vacant. The Wedgwood Ale House & Cafe rebranded as the Wedgwood Public House, keeping tapas-style food and local beer in the same spot at 8515 35th Ave NE. And Mioposto, the restaurant at 3426 NE 55th Street that a speeding car crashed into on July 4, 2025, reopened on December 10, 2025 after months of repair work, one of the few pieces of genuinely good news the district got that year.
The Wedgwood Broiler, meanwhile, keeps doing what it has done since 1965: serving steaks by the ounce, running its lounge until 10 or 11pm depending on the night, and hosting its annual car show, the nineteenth one landed in August 2026. It is the one constant on a block where the buildings around it have changed ownership, closed, or sat empty. Its own future is tied to whatever happens with the shopping center parcel next door, since the original redevelopment plan would have required it to close. For now, it is still there, still serving the same menu, in the same building it has occupied for six decades.
The park that's already there without being built
A few doors down, at 8605 35th Ave NE, sits a different kind of unfinished project. Seattle Parks and Recreation bought this third-of-an-acre lot, a former electrical substation site, in 2014 specifically to build a pocket park. The design was finalized in 2019: a central lawn, walking paths, a curved seat wall, and a concrete pedestal for future public art. Construction was supposed to start years ago. It didn't. The most recent estimate from Seattle Parks now puts groundbreaking in fall or winter 2026 into 2027, more than a decade after the city bought the land.
The neighborhood didn't wait. People have been growing vegetables and flowers on the site and holding informal gatherings there, using the space next to Cafe Javasti at 8617 35th Ave NE as a coffee-and-conversation spot even without a single piece of official park infrastructure. It is the same pattern playing out at a smaller scale: an official plan stalls, and daily life fills in around it anyway.
That is the throughline connecting the shopping center, the pocket park, and the shift toward NE 75th Street. Wedgwood's residents have not been sitting still waiting for the announced projects to resolve. They have quietly built their routines around whatever is actually open, whatever is actually built, and whatever corner of the neighborhood is actually working right now. The 85th Street intersection may eventually get its grocery store back, its pocket park finished, its vacant storefronts filled. Until it does, the neighborhood's real center of gravity sits three blocks south, at an intersection nobody had to fight for.
If you're watching this stretch of 35th Avenue and wondering what any of it might mean down the line, whether for a business, a property, or just your own sense of the neighborhood's next chapter, Mel Parsons Homes keeps a close eye on Wedgwood and is always glad to talk through what's actually happening on the ground.
