Walk from the Amtrak platform on 271st Street to the old brick stretch of 270th and you will pass two downtown project sites inside of six blocks. One is a quarter-acre lot at the west end that spent years fenced off and overgrown. The other is breaking ground this fall near the train depot on the east end. They have different names, different funding sources, and different timelines, but they are the same idea pointed in opposite directions: give downtown Stanwood a gateway on each end while preserving the historic brick pavement in the middle.
That last part is not a metaphor. In February, the Stanwood City Council adopted an ordinance setting standards to protect the historic brick pavement on 270th Street NW amid other downtown improvements. So the loudest, dustiest parts of downtown right now sit at the edges. The quieter middle is the stretch the city has committed by law to protect, even as related improvements continue.
The west end: a $100 lot that took two years and two grants to clean up
The property at the junction of 271st Street NW and 270th Street NW used to belong to Kathleen Raplee and, before that, to a gas station. City staff flagged it back in 2024 as the entry point into west downtown Stanwood, the spot everyone passes on their way toward the brick road or over to 102nd Avenue. The city bought it for $100. That number only makes sense once you know why: decades of contaminated soil and groundwater made the land worth almost nothing to anyone who wasn't planning to pay for the cleanup themselves, which is exactly what the city did next.
Stanwood negotiated a cost-sharing settlement with Chevron, then applied for and received a $250,000 Brownfields grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce to fund remediation. Combined with the Chevron contribution of roughly $190,000, the city had enough to hire Maul Foster & Alongi to manage the cleanup without dipping into general funds. That work is expected to wrap by the end of September, meaning the fenced dirt lot you've been driving past should be getting hydroseeded any week now, not landscaped yet, just stabilized until the next phase of funding comes through.
The site now has an official name and a concept plan: Twin City Plaza. Located near Hamilton Lumber and Thai Thai, the approved design calls for a grassy lawn, benches, a landscape buffer, and a decorative brick gateway meant to double as public art and wayfinding. The full build-out, engineering plus construction, was estimated this past June at around $1.07 million. That estimate covers design work through actual construction, and the city has been clear that full funding for the build phase still depends on the 2027-2028 budget cycle. In plain terms: the dirt gets cleaned up this month, but the plaza itself is a later project.
The east end: Depot Park breaks ground on the same fall calendar
On the opposite side of downtown, near the Amtrak station on 271st Street, construction is expected to start this fall on Depot Park, a second gateway plaza that has been in design since 2025. The plan includes a hard-surface plaza, a covered band shell for events, shaded seating, and public art that nods to Stanwood's history, the same brief given to the Twin City Plaza designers on the other end of town.
The fact that both projects are moving in the same season is not a coincidence of scheduling. They are both pieces of a longer initiative the city calls the Twin City Mile, which is explicitly framed as connecting City Hall Park on 270th Street NW to the train station on 271st Street NW. Stanwood is not building one park. It is building two ends of the same mile at the same time, which means this particular fall is the first stretch where a resident walking downtown will see cleanup at one end and construction at the other end of the corridor simultaneously.
The middle that is being preserved
Between those two sites sits the historic Brick Road on 270th Street NW, and it is moving at a completely different pace on purpose. In November 2025, the city held a workshop with downtown business owners that produced three agreed-upon priorities: preserve old Stanwood, create a pedestrian-friendly event space, and improve visibility and vitality for the businesses along it. The council approved a reworked concept design in January 2026 covering the segment between 102nd Avenue NW and Augusta Avenue, with the stated goal of preserving as much of the original brick as possible.
Then in February, the council went further than a design plan. It adopted Ordinance 1561, which sets permanent standards protecting Stanwood's historic brick roadways rather than leaving preservation as a design preference that could change with the next council. As of the April council update, the early phases of that work, traffic safety fixes, signage, and parking adjustments, are already complete. Lighting upgrades and final design details are what's left. Compared with the gateway sites, which are still in cleanup and pre-construction, the middle has already moved into its remaining lighting and design work.
Some of the smaller upgrades are already visible if you know where to look. Gateway banner poles have gone up on 102nd Avenue between the Stanwood Hotel Saloon and Bank of America. A traffic circle is planned for the Camano Street Triangle, complete with brick pavers that match the corridor and a relocated holiday tree that will no longer sit in the middle of an active intersection.
What's changed for the businesses in between
The infrastructure work has come with direct support for the storefronts caught in the middle of it. In April, the council approved a Storefront Improvement Program grant for Low Bar LLC to cover exterior upgrades, including a new awning and façade improvements. It's a small line item next to a million-dollar plaza estimate, but it's the piece that actually shows up on a sidewalk you walk past every week, and it's part of the same downtown vitality push as the two gateway projects.
The brick road itself is already earning its "festival street" designation in practice. The Meyer Art Festival took over the Brick Road on August 29, drawing crowds despite a rainy morning that cleared just in time for the event. That kind of use, closing the street for an event without needing to redesign it first, is exactly what the preservation-first approach was built to protect.
What this means if you're walking downtown right now
The west-end lot near Hamilton Lumber and Thai Thai should finish its cleanup phase this month, but don't expect a finished plaza there yet. What you'll see is hydroseeded ground holding the site until the city lines up construction funding for the actual build. On the east end, the depot-area work is just getting started this fall, so that site will look more disruptive before it looks better. Neither end is close to a ribbon cutting. Both are at the unglamorous stage where the ground has to be made usable before anything gets built on top of it.
None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened all at once by coincidence either. Two gateway projects moving forward together, a middle stretch locked in by ordinance, and a storefront program filling in the gaps between them: that's a downtown being rebuilt with a sequence in mind, not a wish list. The businesses along the brick, from the Granary to Low Bar to the shops near the Stanwood Hotel Saloon, are the ones who'll feel the difference first once the fences come down on both ends.
If you're curious what a downtown mid-transformation like this tends to mean for property values in the surrounding blocks, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who's watched Snohomish County corridors go through this exact cycle before. Pilchard Properties tracks these shifts across Stanwood and the rest of the county as part of our day-to-day work, and if you're a homeowner nearby and curious what any of this means for your own address, our free instant home valuation is a fast, no-pressure way to find out.
