In 2023, Clarissa Griego served coffee out of a tent at a lowrider block party in White Center, working off borrowed ice chests and whatever equipment her friends could lend her for the day. She called the operation Café Calaveras, after the sugar skulls of Día de los Muertos. There was no storefront, no lease, no guarantee anyone would remember the name by the following weekend.
Two years later, Café Calaveras has a permanent address on Yesler Way, a 4.8-star rating, and a regular crowd of neighbors who show up for the Matcha con Amore and stay for the conversation. The path between those two points runs directly through Seattle's Waterfront Park, and it tells you more about whether that park actually worked than any visitor count from its opening season.
An Opening Season Is Easy. A Second Fall Is the Real Test
Waterfront Park held its full Grand Opening Celebration on September 6, 2025, closing out fifteen years of planning and construction on the footprint where the Alaskan Way Viaduct once stood. The first "Grand Opening Season" that followed brought more than 3.4 million visitors to the 20 acres between Pioneer Square and Belltown. That kind of number is what you'd expect from a ribbon-cutting on a $806 million public works project. Crowds show up for openings. The harder question, one year on, is what a park does with people once the novelty wears off and it's just another Tuesday.
Seattle's answer has been to build small-business turnover directly into the park's design, not as an afterthought but as infrastructure. Long before the full park opened, Pier 62 was already running as an activation space, hosting rotating vendors in a residency program meant to give local makers a low-risk way to test whether their business could survive in front of real foot traffic. Griego's pop-up was one of them. She spent roughly two years there, developing the "cafecito & chisme" branding that became a fixture of the park's winter firepit socials, before the residency gave her enough consistent revenue and community standing to go looking for a permanent space.
That's the mechanism worth paying attention to. A park that only hosts polished, pre-funded retail from day one is a park built for visitors passing through. A park that runs a working incubator, one that produces at least one graduate who leaves and opens somewhere else in the city, is a park that's actually functioning as civic infrastructure.
Two Businesses, Two Different Kinds of Success
Not every Waterfront Park vendor story ends the same way, and the contrast is useful.
| Business | Started | Later outcome | What it demonstrates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Café Calaveras | Pop-up residency at Pier 62, 2023 | Brick-and-mortar at 860 Yesler Way in Vulcan Real Estate's Batik building, opened September 2025 | A pop-up outgrew the park and moved into the surrounding neighborhood |
| Boon Boona Coffee | Selected through a 2024 request for proposals for the Overlook Walk concessionaire space | Still operating as the permanent café inside the park | A pop-up-style vetting process produced a tenant that stayed put |
Café Calaveras took over a space on Yesler Way formerly occupied by Tougo Coffee, which had closed in 2024. Blake Taylor of West Coast Commercial Realty brokered the deal, and Griego opened with support from Friends of Waterfront Park, the small business nonprofit Ventures, SCORE, and Aqui Mercado, plus mentorship from Ghost Alley Espresso in Pike Place Market, where she'd worked as a barista before striking out on her own. "I started with nothing but heart," she told Seattle Magazine around the opening. The shop now serves conchas from Bakescape and breakfast tacos from Sunrise Tacos alongside her own menu, and it sits across from Yesler Terrace Park, a few blocks removed from the waterfront that made it possible.
Boon Boona Coffee took the other path. When the city put out its request for proposals for the Overlook Walk café in 2024, it projected that the space would help push annual park visitation from roughly 6 million to 14 million once the elevated walkway and its concessionaire were both fully open. Boon Boona, which sources its beans from African coffee growers, won that slot and has operated it since, serving as the anchor food and beverage stop for anyone walking the elevated path between Pike Place Market and the Salish Steps.
One business left the park and took its customers into the neighborhood. The other stayed exactly where the city put it. Both outcomes count as wins, and together they're a better signal than the opening-day crowd size ever was.
What's Been Happening Down There Lately
If you live in Seattle and haven't been down to the waterfront since the ribbon-cutting hype died down, here's a look at recent and ongoing activity:
- Spotlight at Waterfront Park runs free every Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. through September 24, staged on Pier 58 and at the Salish Steps amphitheater beneath Overlook Walk. It's local musicians and community performers, not touring acts, which is the point.
- The 34th annual Salmon Homecoming took over the stretch from Pier 62 to Pier 58 on September 19, with a vendor marketplace, a weaving workshop, and a canoe landing at the Pier 62 floating dock. It's an annual fixture that predates the new park by decades, now folded into the redesigned space.
- The Promenade Pop-Up Vendor Program is in its second season, rotating small makers and food vendors through shipping-container stalls along the promenade. May is treated as the program's unofficial kickoff, tied to Small Business Month.
- The Waterfront Shuttle, which connects the park to downtown parking and transit, runs seasonally from May through September, so this month is close to its last stretch before the schedule shifts.
There's also a quieter marker of the park's transition from launch mode to steady state. Joy Shigaki, who led Friends of Waterfront Park as president and CEO since 2022 and steered the organization through construction and the 2025 opening, stepped down this July. Her final day was marked by the group's annual Pier Party fundraiser, themed Disco this year. Founding leadership stepping back after the launch phase is a normal transition for any organization, and it's one more sign that the park has moved past the era of grand gestures and into the slower work of running weekly programming, year after year.
Why This Matters If You're Watching the Neighborhood
None of this is a reason to buy or sell anything. It's a reason to notice what kind of place downtown Seattle has become since the viaduct came down. A public space that can hand off small-business tenants into the surrounding streets, and keep others running in place for a full year without turnover, is doing something more durable than drawing a crowd for a weekend. That durability is exactly what shows up later in how a neighborhood holds its value and its character, long after the opening banners come down.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these shifts because you're weighing a move in the Eastside or a second home in the Pacific Northwest, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches both sides of it closely. Denise O'Connell works across Bellevue, the Eastside, and Seattle, and pays attention to exactly this kind of ground-level detail. Let's connect.
