What's Changing Along the Edmonds Waterfront, and What Isn't

A sign went up on Arnie's front door on Monday, September 21. After 45 years on the Edmonds waterfront, the restaurant closed permanently, and that sign was the announcement. The building around it has a well-publicized future, with a boutique hotel planned and construction not expected to begin until 2029. The restaurant's last day arrived years earlier than that.

That timing points to a gap between the plan Edmonds read about last year and what happened on the ground this month.

What the 2025 announcement actually said

In June of last year, the Port of Edmonds signed a 50-year ground lease with 1010 Development, a company run by father-and-son team Mike and Ryan Appleby, for the waterfront building at 300 Admiral Way known as The Landing. The building had been owned for two decades by Catspaw LLC, and Arnie's was its flagship tenant among 14 businesses.

The plan Ryan Appleby described was a boutique hotel with a wellness spa, sauna, social club, event space, and a first-floor café serving coffee and grab-and-go food. The building's footprint would stay the same, but the structure itself would be a full teardown, subject to design review, public input, and a permitting process complicated by the site's seismic hazard designation. Nothing about that process moves quickly. Construction wasn't projected to start until 2029.

The Port's own announcement was clear on one point: Arnie's and the building's other tenants would remain in place and open until construction begins. Appleby had already lined up a new tenant, Snoqualmie Gourmet Ice Cream, to fill space in the building, which read at the time like a story about gradual, orderly transition. A restaurant with 45 years behind it, still years from an actual construction date, still serving the same happy hour crowd while the paperwork worked its way through commission meetings.

Arnie's closed on September 21, roughly three years before the 2029 construction estimate. The Landing building is still standing, and the hotel rendering has not been released yet. The announced timeline and the restaurant's last day did not line up.

A few blocks up, a different kind of adjustment

Girardi's Osteria on 5th Avenue, family-owned since 1999, is responding to rising costs. Owner Fred Milani redesigned the menu this month around smaller standard portions, with the option to add extra meat to build back up to the size regulars are used to. The seafood, vegetarian, and gluten-free options stayed. So did the weekly specials and the more than 20 items on the happy hour list. Milani framed it plainly, saying the redesign is meant to "give you control over your dining experience and your check."

Girardi's menu change came on its own timeline, independent of anything the Port or a developer had scheduled. Arnie's last day did not follow the redevelopment calendar either.

That's the pattern worth noticing this fall. The changes that get announced with press releases and commission votes, the hotel, the ground lease, the design review, move at the pace of paperwork. The changes that actually show up on Main Street and Admiral Way move at the pace of individual businesses making their own decisions. This fall, the two schedules did not line up.

The calendar upstairs hasn't slowed down at all

While the waterfront's restaurant roster shrinks by one, the town's arts calendar for the same six weeks is about as full as it gets. Edmonds Center for the Arts has seven ticketed shows scheduled across sixteen days in October. Michael Douglas brings his live show on October 11. Booker T. Jones plays October 16. The center marks its 20th anniversary with a gala on October 17. October 24 is a double bill, an interactive Beatles experience at 5 p.m. followed by the Cascade Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven's Seventh at 8. A tribute to the Eagles closes out the run on October 26.

Downtown's Third Thursday Art Walk falls in the middle of all that, on October 15, running 5 to 8 p.m. as it does every month, with galleries and shops opening their doors and hosting local artists in person. Downtown Edmonds holds the distinction of being Washington's first Certified Creative District, and the Art Walk is the monthly reminder of why: it doesn't require a hotel to get built or a lease to get signed. It's been running on the same schedule for years and it's still running now.

That steadiness matters against the backdrop of the waterfront's disrupted timeline. The Landing's redevelopment is still mostly paperwork, years from a groundbreaking, but its most visible tenant already left. Meanwhile the Art Walk and Edmonds Center for the Arts keep operating on a rhythm nobody had to renegotiate. One part of town is waiting on a plan that hasn't caught up to events. Another part of town never needed a plan in the first place.

What this actually means if you live here

If you've been watching the Arnie's building and wondering when the hotel is coming, the honest answer is not yet, and probably not for a while. The lease is signed, the concept is public, but the design work, the permitting, and the seismic review are still ahead, and none of that has a firm date attached beyond the general estimate of 2029. What did happen was the closure of the building's flagship restaurant, years ahead of the construction estimate.

The hotel is still years from a groundbreaking. The sign on Arnie's door has already come down.

I keep an eye on projects like the Landing not because I'm marketing waterfront condos this month, but because knowing which announcements are locked in and which are still just renderings is part of knowing Edmonds well enough to be useful to the people who live here. If you want the plain version of what's actually happening on the waterfront or anywhere else in town, Krissy Ayad is easy to reach. Let's Connect.