Seattle Sketcher impressed with changes to Aurora

Gabriel Campanario. Sketched April 26, 4:12 pm

Gabriel Campanario, The Seattle Times' Seattle Sketcher, was impressed with the changes to Aurora Avenue in Shoreline, so he chose a stretch of the road under construction at N 185 to make a sketch of the Interurban Trail at the Gateway Plaza site. His second sketch was our signature blue bridges.

Shoreline Bridges. Gabriel Campanario.

In his comments in The Seattle Times, he said,

Aurora Avenue may be the least scenic drive in Seattle, but enter Shoreline and things start to look a little different. 

Beyond North 145th Street, I found a nice stretch of the highway that I'd missed two years ago, when I sketched a car lot amid tacky signs and utility poles in North Seattle for my first Seattle Sketcher column.

Shoreline has been fixing up Aurora with new sidewalks, medians and pedestrian bridges that even light up at night. Now, they want to make the stretch between 175th and 185th the heart of the city. 

"We don't have a downtown. We want to create a town center," said Kristen Overleese, a city project manager who greeted me as I sketched the decorative base of a new traffic-light pole ready to be installed. Overleese said improvements up to 185th are expected to be finished by August, completing two of three miles of the Shoreline Aurora Corridor project.

See previous sketch.