Walk past 23rd and Union on a Saturday afternoon this summer and you can hear two things at once. A DJ set drifting out from the Midtown Square courtyard, and, across the street, the low hum of a construction fence going up around the church parcels where The Bascomb is being drawn up. That's the season in the CD right now. Culture and cranes, on the same block, at the same time.
If you already live here, the temptation with the World Cup summer is to assume the interesting stuff is happening somewhere else. It isn't. The most useful thing to know about the Central District between now and Labor Day is that the neighborhood is doing two jobs at once: hosting the calendar and rebuilding the intersection that anchors it.
Two groundbreakings, one intersection
23rd and Union has been the neighborhood's argument about itself for a decade. This is the summer the argument stops being theoretical.
Central District developer Jaebadiah Gardner is well in front of plans for a taller and denser Seattle. Gardner Global has announced The Sarah Queen, a new Black-owned development set to rise at 23rd and Union, will break ground in June. Across the street, plans for The Bascomb are also now taking shape. On the west side of 23rd Ave, things are still in the paperwork phase. According to permits filed this month with the city, The Bascomb is planned to rise seven stories on the west side of 23rd Ave, creating 54 units and a small, five-car parking garage.
The names carry weight. The Sarah Queen honors his grandmother, business owner and community leader Sarah Queen Gardner. The Bascomb honors the Bascomb family including Paul Bascomb a real estate pioneer and community leader in the Central District, and his daughter Nicole Bascomb-Green who led the sale of the church property.
One block south, Acer House is already vertical. Backed by a $12.6 million low-interest loan from Amazon's Housing Equity Fund, Acer House will deliver 121 affordable housing units, serving residents earning between 40% and 80% of the area median income. Developers Urban Black and Great Expectations are partnering on the project. The project includes a public courtyard for gatherings, and affordable commercial spaces to foster local businesses.
Stitch those three sites together and you get 175-plus new homes and multiple ground-floor commercial bays inside a five-minute walk. If you have wondered why the corner has felt like a construction staging area for eighteen months, this is the summer you can start to see the reason.
The calendar residents are actually using
The World Cup summer brought a lot of citywide programming. The CD's share of it is heavier and more specific than the press releases suggest. Here is what is worth putting on the fridge:
- June 7 — Can I Kick It? Black Brilliance in Motion, at LANGSTON. A FREE, family-friendly celebration exploring the connection between football, Black history, and the African diaspora ahead of the 2026 World Cup. Sunday, June 7 | 1 – 6 PM 104 17th Ave S. Seattle, WA 98144 FREE + All Ages. Featuring: Storytelling and multimedia presentation with Black Arrow FC. Interactive soccer activities. Music + community gathering. Food from local Black vendors.
- July 3–4 — Eritrean Arts and Music Festival, Central District, noon–10 PM. Two days of programming that has quietly become one of the more reliable summer draws in the neighborhood, listed on the City's official summer arts roundup.
- July 6 — Peace Peloton HUB & SPOKE, Pioneer Square to Central District, noon–9 PM. A group ride that terminates here, not somewhere else. If you have ever wanted an excuse to sit on your stoop and watch the neighborhood fill up, this is it.
- July 8 — Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, 6:00 PM at LHPAI. A regular programming date at 104 17th Ave S, hosted inside the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute.
- July 18 — Youth film camp screening at LANGSTON. The end product of a five-day camp for ages 10 to 15, and one of the few free Saturday afternoon events on the calendar this month.
Two things tie this list together. Every event on it is free. And four of the five happen inside a 12-block box you can walk end to end in twenty minutes.
The gathering map, quietly refreshed
The dining and retail scene here has been shifting under residents' feet for two years. Summer 2026 is when several of the reopens and relocations finally read like a pattern instead of a series of Instagram posts.
Donna Moodie's Marjorie's is the headline. Originally opened in 2003, restaurateur and community advocate Donna Moodie named Marjorie's restaurant in homage to her mother. Marjorie's quickly became a Seattle favorite, and staple in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, however, due in part to extraordinary impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, Moodie shuttered Marjorie's doors in 2023 after 20 years of service. Now, through investment from the BCO Fund, Moodie is reopening Marjorie's in a new commercial space in Seattle's Central District with a new concept while keeping the same spirit and focus on community.
The mechanism matters as much as the restaurant. The Fund establishes real estate partnerships (LLCs) to acquire ground-level commercial properties within mixed-use buildings. Owners of participating businesses join the LLC, managed by Grow America, ensuring that commercial spaces are leased to them with stable and affordable occupancy costs, unaffected by market fluctuations. Translation for the block: an operator who left the neighborhood during the pandemic era is back with a lease structure specifically designed to keep her here.
Around Marjorie's, the working list of neighborhood anchors reads like this:
- Communion Restaurant and Bar, still one of the most consistently full dining rooms east of I-5.
- Central Cinema, the EverOut-listed go-to for classic movies with table service.
- Northwest African American Museum, whose exhibitions remain the most durable reason to bring an out-of-town guest three blocks off Jackson.
- booSH, the plant shop at 2311 S Jackson. The Central District's new plant nursery, and so much more. The Black-owned plant shop opened its doors to this intimate, 520 square foot space on Juneteenth of this year with one goal in mind: to enrich lives through plant gifting and ownership.
Notice what these have in common. None of them are trying to be a destination. They are trying to be a place a neighbor walks to on a Tuesday. That is a different bar than the one being cleared by rooftop bars in South Lake Union this summer, and it is the bar that keeps a residential neighborhood functional through a construction cycle.
The most honest test for a neighborhood in transition isn't the ribbon-cutting count. It's whether the businesses that were here before the cranes arrived are still here when the cranes leave.
By that test, the CD is doing better this July than it did in July 2024.
One Saturday that uses all of it
If you want a Saturday in late July that puts the neighborhood to work without pretending it's a tour:
Start at LANGSTON at 104 17th Ave S. Poke into whatever is on the calendar, even if it is just the box office being open. Walk south to Jackson, cut west, and stop at booSH for a small plant you did not know you needed. Loop up to Union on foot. Stand at 23rd and Union for a minute. Look east at where The Sarah Queen is rising and west at where The Bascomb permits are pinned to the fence. That corner is going to look substantially different by summer 2027, and the version you see now is worth remembering.
Grab an early dinner at Communion. If there is a wait, and there will be, walk two blocks over to Marjorie's and let the host at Communion text you.
End the night at Central Cinema with something you have already seen twice.
That is the whole route. Two miles, maybe two and a half. No car required.
What this summer is really telling you
The generic version of a Central District summer post lists five festivals and calls it a day. The version that is actually useful for someone who lives here is shorter and blunter.
The CD in summer 2026 is a neighborhood in the middle of a physical rebuild of its main commercial spine, running that rebuild alongside its heaviest event calendar in years, and doing both without losing the small operators who define daily life on the residential blocks. That is a rare combination. Neighborhoods that host this many cranes usually shed this many small businesses. That is not what is happening here, and the reason is a specific stack of tools — the BCO Fund, the Africatown Community Land Trust, Gardner Global's Black-owned development pipeline — being applied inside a five-block radius on purpose.
If you own here, the practical read is that the ground under your block is being actively re-underwritten by long-horizon actors, not flipped. If you rent here, the practical read is that the summer programming at LANGSTON, the Eritrean Arts and Music Festival, and the Peace Peloton ride are worth showing up for, because attendance is part of how a neighborhood keeps its calendar next year.
Either way, the Saturday route above is the same.
If you own a home in the Central District and are curious what the 23rd and Union pipeline means for your specific block, Terry McMahan at homebysix has been working these streets for close to two decades and is happy to talk without a pitch attached. Request your personalized home valuation at homebysix.com when you're ready.
