The Corner of 6th and Main Has Been Finished Longer Than You Think

"The idea was to assimilate into downtown Edmonds. It's a very walkable town. I thought, how can I help Edmonds?"

That's Mike McMurray, the Edmonds native who bought the half-acre lot at 6th Avenue and Main Street back in 2017, after learning it might otherwise be sold off and bulldozed for condos. He didn't build condos. He spent close to a decade turning that corner into Main Street Commons, and if your mental image of the place is still "the one with the ice cream line and the construction tape," you're not thinking of the finished project. You're thinking of 2023.

Main Street Commons has now been fully open, all six storefronts running, for more than a year. It just never announced itself that way, because it was never built to open all at once.

The Corner That Was Almost Condos

Before it was a plaza, the site held a 1950s Thriftway grocery warehouse, the kind of mid-century building that gets torn down without much ceremony in most towns. McMurray kept it. The project that emerged uses two structures: the renovated 1954 Thriftway warehouse, and a newly built structure locals now call the Commons Building, with an open plaza in between holding two small performance stages, string lights, and a planted dwarf noble fir.

The design brief, as McMurray described it at the time, centered on five things: business synergies, art, civic connections, open space, and architectural character. That's an unusual pitch for a half-acre retail development. Most corner lots this size become a bank branch and a nail salon. This one got a mural commission, a firetruck display, and a plan for the mezzanine to double as a family game room.

Six Doors, Twenty-Two Months

The commons didn't open. It filled, one tenant at a time, over nearly two years.

Molly Moon's opening day tells you something about how this rollout actually worked. Customers lined up around a storefront that was, by its own owner's admission, still surrounded by an active job site. Founder Molly Moon Neitzel came by in person and called Edmonds her tenth location, the first outside the immediate Seattle core. Nobody waited for the rest of the commons to catch up. The scoop shop just opened, and the plaza built itself around it over the following 22 months.

That's a long runway for a project this size. The total build, per public reporting on the development, ran close to $6 million. Most of that money went into two buildings and the space between them, not into a single grand-opening weekend.

Why the Order Mattered

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only visited once, early on, and filed the commons away as "the ice cream place."

Neitzel said something when Molly Moon's opened that turned out to describe the whole project, not just her shop:

"The whole vision for the Commons is based around the idea of creating a truly multi-generational space that all of Edmonds can enjoy, and that's what really sold me."

A multi-generational space doesn't get built by leasing six units to six operators and cutting one ribbon. It gets built by letting an ice cream shop establish a following before a wine bar moves in next door, letting a coffee roaster find its regulars before a chef-driven tavern with duckpin bowling opens across the plaza. Each business had room to become a habit for somebody before the next one arrived.

The civic details reinforce the point. The city's 1938 fire truck now sits on permanent display in an alley off the Commons building, a detail requested during community input sessions, not tacked on afterward. The rooftop mural, Journey of Salmon, was designed by Tacoma-based Coast Salish artist Paige Pettibon as part of Art Walk Edmonds' Mural Project, using traditional Coast Salish colors to represent the waterways that once served as travel routes for Pacific Northwest tribes. None of that reads like a strip mall's landscaping budget. It reads like a plaza that was designed to be used, not just visited.

What's Actually There Now

If you haven't walked through since the Crumpet Shop's storefront opened in May 2025, here's what a full loop looks like today.

Start at Stillhouse Coffee on Main Street, where Brian Eastland has been roasting beans out of his Edmonds home for close to two decades, going back to a business plan he wrote as a college capstone project at Baylor. The shop's name is the same one he used in that assignment. A few doors down, Virtue Cellars pours wine made at its Richmond Beach production facility in a tasting room built to be genuinely kid-friendly, close enough to Molly Moon's that parents can watch their kids run between the two.

Upstairs in the Commons Building, Johnny Mo's Pizzeria serves both Chicago and New York style pies from an operation that fed the Eastlake neighborhood for years before expanding north. Across the plaza, in the renovated Thriftway warehouse, The Victor Tavern runs a Thursday prime rib special in three cuts and keeps a mezzanine stocked with duckpin bowling and shuffleboard for anyone who wants a game with dinner. Next door, The Crumpet Shop bakes the same griddle cakes that have been served at Pike Place Market since 1976, now under owners Cooper and Amy Golding, who bought the original shop from its founders, Gary Lasater and Nancy McFaul, in 2023 and brought a second location here two years later.

Six businesses, two buildings, one plaza, and almost none of it happened on the same calendar page.

The Point of Finishing

Most development stories end at the ribbon cutting. This one doesn't have a single ribbon cutting to point to, because the commons was finished in installments and each installment looked, from the sidewalk, like just another new business opening on Main Street. It took until a bakery known for crumpets moved into the last open storefront for the project to actually be done.

That was sixteen months ago. If your last visit predates it, you've been treating a finished neighborhood fixture like a project still in progress. It isn't. The plaza that was supposed to become condos in 2017 is now the kind of corner where a toddler can watch ice cream get scooped while a parent finishes a glass of wine next door, where a coffee order takes twenty years to become a storefront, and where a fifty-year-old Pike Place tradition found its second home just up the street from the ferry terminal.

Worth the walk, even if you think you already know what's there.

If you're weighing a move within Edmonds or just curious what a corner like this does for the streets around it, Haines Huff Properties knows this neighborhood block by block. Request Your Free Home Valuation to see what your Edmonds property is worth in today's market.