"It looks like Wedgwood has dodged a bullet."
That's how one neighbor summed up the news in January, when the redevelopment plan for the Wedgwood Center finally collapsed after nearly four years of design meetings, permit filings, and community pushback. Whether you read that sentence as relief or as one more delay depends on how badly you want a grocery store back on 35th Ave NE. Either way, it captures something true about this stretch of Northeast Seattle: the big story here has been stuck in the same place since 2021, while the small story keeps quietly moving forward without anyone announcing it.
If you've lived in Wedgwood for more than a few years, you already know the outline. What you might not have added up is how long it's actually been, and what's been filling the gaps while everyone waits.
The Anchors Keep Leaving. The Deal Keeps Not Closing.
The corner of 35th Ave NE and NE 85th Street has lost its two biggest tenants and hasn't replaced either one.
- 2021 – QFC closes its Wedgwood store, ending the corner's run as a full grocery anchor.
- 2022 – Developer Security Properties submits early plans to redevelop the site with a new grocery anchor and housing above it.
- 2024 – The city's design review board recommends denying three of the five site departures Security Properties had requested, including a curb cut onto 35th. One member of the developer's team reportedly called the outcome a dealbreaker for the grocery component.
- July 2025 – Rite Aid, across the street from the old QFC, closes too.
- January 2026 – Security Properties announces its purchase agreement with the property owner has fallen apart. No investment partner, no deal.
- June 2026 – The Wedgwood Community Council reports a new developer, understood to be Madison Development Group, has quietly taken over the permit file and submitted a revised plan set.
- September 2026 – The council's latest post is titled, simply, "Wedgwood Center Development Hits a Pause Again."
Five years, two failed grocery anchors, one shelved deal, and a second developer who hasn't yet held a public meeting. That's not a neighborhood in decline. It's a single commercial parcel that has been mid-transaction since before some Wedgwood Elementary students could read.
The assumption a lot of residents have made is that the site is simply too small for a grocery store, which is why nothing's worked. The numbers say otherwise. The old QFC ran about 15,000 square feet. Rite Aid, across the street, was closer to 25,000. PCC's Corner Market format, which the company opened at the base of Rainier Tower, operates on roughly 6,000 square feet. The site was never the constraint. The financing structure, the parking ratio, and the curb cut fight were.
What Opened While Nobody Was Watching the Big Corner
While the shopping center parcel sat in permitting limbo, the rest of the strip kept turning over in small, ordinary ways that don't require an investment partner or a Master Use Permit hearing.
Lovestruck in Seattle opened at 8507 35th Ave NE in October 2025, a new bookstore in a business district that hadn't had one. At the NE 75th Street intersection, two restaurants moved in the same year: Akebono, serving Japanese cuisine including sushi and rice dishes, and An Nam Pho, a Vietnamese spot doing pho and rice dishes, joining longer-standing neighbors like Grand Central Bakery and Sophie's Tacos. In January 2026, the storefront that Birds Connect Seattle vacated at 35th and NE 82nd became blosm studio, a wellness and bodywork space that had spent years hosting classes around North Seattle before settling into a permanent home.
A few minutes away in the neighboring blocks toward Ravenna, Mioposto reopened in December after a car crashed through its dining room the previous July. No injuries, a rebuilt storefront, and a restaurant back in its space within five months.
None of these openings made the news the way the shopping center saga did. None of them needed a design review board. That's arguably the point. The businesses that depend on financing structures and curb cut approvals have been stuck since 2021. The businesses that just need a lease have kept opening the entire time.
The Things That Were Never Going to Change
Some of what defines a Tuesday in Wedgwood has nothing to do with what's vacant or what's for lease.
The Wedgwood Broiler, a neighborhood restaurant and cocktail lounge that's been serving its signature London Broil since 1965, hosted its car show on August 23. More than sixty years in, the restaurant is still there, still doing weekend prime rib, still the fixed point everyone measures the corner's other changes against. The community council's own picnic returns Saturday, September 19, from 3 to 7 p.m., same format as most years: food, music, kids' activities. The neighborhood's Halloween trick-or-treat along the 35th Ave NE business district runs again on October 31 from 4 to 6 p.m., with council volunteers serving as crossing guards at NE 75th and NE 85th so families can move between storefronts safely.
And half a mile off the strip, on a residential corner at 28th Avenue NE and NE 72nd Street, sits a 19-foot glacial erratic that arrived by way of the Vashon ice sheet roughly 14,000 years ago. Wedgwood Rock has been sitting in the same spot since before there was a neighborhood to name after it, let alone a shopping center to argue about. It's not a landmark because it's impressive to look at. It's a landmark because it's the one fixed reference point nobody's ever proposed redeveloping.
The Pattern, Once You Put It Together
Here's what five years of watching this corner actually shows: the businesses that require a developer, a bank, and a city permit are the least stable part of Wedgwood's commercial life, not the most. The QFC closed. The Rite Aid closed. The redevelopment meant to replace both of them has already burned through one developer and paused a second time under a new one. Meanwhile the Wedgwood Broiler has outlasted the entire redevelopment saga next door, a bookstore opened without needing anyone's permission but a landlord's, and a restaurant that got hit by a car was back open in five months, faster than the shopping center project has moved in five years.
If you've been waiting for the grocery store to come back before you feel settled here, that wait has already outlasted a presidential term. If you've been measuring the neighborhood by what's sitting vacant at 85th and 35th, you've been measuring the wrong corner. The version of Wedgwood that actually holds together is the one built from a 60-year-old restaurant, a bookstore that opened on a quiet block, two new restaurants at 75th, and a council that still runs the same picnic and the same trick-or-treat every year regardless of what's happening two blocks north.
None of this means the shopping center redevelopment doesn't matter. A returning grocery anchor would genuinely change daily errands for a lot of households on this side of the neighborhood. It means the wait for it isn't the same thing as the neighborhood standing still. Those have been two different stories running in parallel since 2021, and it's worth knowing which one you're actually living in day to day.
If you're watching this corner because you're thinking about what a home near it is worth, or what it might mean for your own plans in Wedgwood or elsewhere in Northeast Seattle, that's a longer conversation, and one grounded in more than a permit timeline. Dorothee Graham has spent two decades working in these specific streets and can walk through what corridors like this one actually mean for buyers and sellers nearby. Let's Connect when you're ready to talk it through.
