Flow Eastlake's Public Stairway Opens After a Year Behind a Fence
The Eastlake News reported that the public stairway built with Flow Eastlake stayed fenced off for a year because WSDOT had leased the lot at its top, until the fence came down in May 2025.
In June 2025, The Eastlake News reported on the public stairway built with Flow Eastlake and why it stayed closed for a year after the building opened. The 78 steps run from Fairview Avenue East up to Eastlake Avenue East, where Route 70 stops and a RapidRide J stop is planned.
A stairway at this spot had been suggested about a decade earlier in a proposed Fairview Green Street plan. Eastlake Real Estate Partners, Flow’s developer, agreed to pay the roughly $250,000 construction cost. The City approved the stairs as part of the project’s Master Use Permit, and work began in 2021. The paper also noted that Flow replaced an overgrown lot on that block of Fairview and added a new sidewalk.
When Flow opened to tenants in May 2024, the top of the stairs ended at a construction fence around an empty paved lot, cutting off the route to the sidewalk and bus stop. A year later the fence was still up. The City told the paper the lot belonged to the Washington State Department of Transportation. On May 5, 2025, WSDOT confirmed it had leased the lot to the contractor Skanska as a staging area for the SR 520 bridge program. It said a walkway through the active work zone was unlikely for about five years, and that the City had never told it about the stairway.
Three days after that exchange, the fence came down without any announcement or explanation, and the stairway opened to the public a year after it was finished.
This is our summary. The full article by Nick Harrison appeared in The Eastlake News on June 3, 2025.
Read the full article at The Eastlake News
