How this Ballard micro-neighborhood reflects an ever-changing Seattle

Ever heard of West Woodland? Or Stumbletown? Unless you live nearby, you may be unfamiliar with the micro-neighborhood, which emerges from Phinney Ridge’s western slope before it flattens into Ballard. 

The community spans some 20 blocks from Ballard High School to the Lake Washington Ship Canal and bears witness to where the Burke-Gilman Trail becomes unlinked. Breweries dot the neighborhood of single-family homes. With Seattle quickly changing in the cozy confines of West Woodland and beyond, the neighborhood cannot buck evolution; it’s had to change.

West Woodland has evolved into a microcosm of Seattle: a growing, trendy place proud of its working-class heritage and holding tight to its grungy roots. And like the rest of the Emerald City, the neighborhood is wrestling with the realities of housing shortages and cost of living increases.

The neighborhood’s northern border and main drag, which stretches for over a quarter mile along Northwest 65th Street, exemplifies that change. While it’s evolved over the decades to welcome on-trend cafes, bars and restaurants, the street’s newcomers are interspersed with storied stalwarts, including a nearly-century-old arts venue. 

Although the strip known to some as Stumbletown has modernized over the decades, community proprietors continue offering visitors something timeless in this dining district: a home away from home.

Here’s how this neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood transformed into what it is today, according to those who know it well.

Blue-collar roots

Brian LeBlanc, 48, a Ballard and Stumbletown resident since 2006 and former freelance writer for the now-defunct Ballard News Tribune, described a Ballard of yore populated by shingle mills. 

“Down where Fred Meyer Ballard is now there was a shingle mill,” LeBlanc said. “There were lots of shingle mills. That was kind of what Ballard was known for.” (Hence, the other neighborhood moniker, Shingletown.)

A trolley line sprung up between the mills dotted along the Ballard waterfront and wove through the surrounding neighborhood. LeBlanc believes West Woodland owes its existence to the trolley as houses sprouted up around the route. 

One line’s terminus lay at Northwest 65th Street, where the bars began to crop up. Sailors and shingle mill workers would hop on the trolley after work and hop off where they could warm a bar stool and nurse a beer, LeBlanc described.

“I imagine most of those bars there for today can trace their lineage back to that trolley,” he said. 

That bar district and its hard-drinking patrons earned the street an enduring nickname: Stumbletown. Nods to the nickname are seen today in local businesses Stumbletown Records and the Stumbletown sandwich shack, which will move four blocks west and consolidate with local bistro Joli later this fall.

Decades later, the trolley is long gone, but the stretch of Northwest 65th Street has held to its roots. Near Stumbletown’s watering holes, Ballard began feeling its growing pains.

LeBlanc, who first moved to Ballard nearly two decades ago, spoke fondly of a community once filled with Scandinavian bakeries, funky architecture and beloved gathering places like the Sunset Bowl bowling alley, which closed in 2008. His old neighborhood newspaper column on local history and observations of early 2000s Ballard now feels like a community time capsule. 

Around that time, the small-town Ballard as longtime residents knew it began to morph into the newer, denser and pricier neighborhood many know today.

Yet, despite those changes, the Stumbletown stretch along Northwest 65th Street still feels true to its roots — “a little scrappy,” LeBlanc said.

The grunge glory days

While Northwest 65th Street’s drunken sailor stereotype may have earned the section of West Woodland its Stumbletown name, according to Cafe Bambino co-owner Gretchen Kudla, the scrappy neighborhood became a draw for Seattle creative types in the late 1990s. 

When she and her husband started their “artisticky, punk-rocky coffee shop” in 1997, the neighborhood still had that element of Seattle grunge. 

“It wasn’t a seedy neighborhood,” Kudla said, “but it was blue collar-y, so things were affordable.”

In the past, many of the older homes near Northwest 65th Street housed artists, musicians and students, said Kudla, who has lived in the area since 2001. Some of those creatives slung coffee at Cafe Bambino to help pay their rent on $5.15 to $6.50 an hour, the minimum wage between 1997 and 2000, she said. (Kudla counts singer-songwriter Jen Wood, who collaborated with The Postal Service, among the coffee shop’s past baristas.)

Since then, many of those old houses are being torn down to make way for new developments; the city of Seattle rezoned Ballard in 2016 to allow such developments. As West Woodland housing has become more expensive, the artists who shaped Stumbletown’s character are being priced out, Kudla said. 

Over two decades ago in 2003, the median Ballard home sold for $303,000. In September 2024, the median sale price in the area was $875,000 — nearly triple the cost. Meanwhile, rent across Seattle has increased 92% since 2010. 

While the neighborhood has lost some of its artsy grit, Cafe Bambino has managed to weather these changes, a success Kudla attributes to its tight-knit community. The cafe has always had a dedicated customer base, but the community support really shone throughout the pandemic and its aftermath. 

During the pandemic’s social distancing phase, people gravitated toward Cafe Bambino’s Wi-Fi-less patio. To this day, the inside of the shop still hasn’t reopened to customers, but the patio has proved sufficient, according to Kudla.  

“It’s almost old-fashioned,” she said. “People are reading books, they’re talking to each other, telling stories, playing guitar.”

Just like Stumbletown as a whole, Cafe Bambino has stood the test of time because of its scrappiness and the neighbors who value that spirit. The patio community is exemplative of the support Bambino always had, it’s just easier to see now, she explained. 

“They … created their own community that’s not based on one individual person, but based on a feeling — a feeling of home, a feeling of community, that we’ve got each other,” Kudla said. “They babysit each others’ dogs, each others’ kids, they refer each other to their mechanics.” 

Kudla continued, “I think that community has value.”

Stumbletown in 2024 

Today, Northwest 65th Street has reinvented itself again into a commercial row of shops, bars and under-the-radar restaurants. One of the latest additions: Asian comfort food specialists Ginger & Scallion, which opened in January. The restaurant is still drawing crowds of fans months later, thanks to the cultlike following co-owners and brothers Akarawin “Boss” Lertsirisin and Jakkapat “JP” Lertsirisin drummed up with their Shilshole Bay spot, Secret Congee. 

But Stumbletown’s five-block stretch still takes pride in its scrappy history, too.

Some of the longest-running businesses on the street are still there, like 1938-era Tin Hat Bar & Grill. Irish bar Molly Maguires opened in the 1990s, but its building previously housed several bars since 1939. One of the oldest still kicking on the street is the nearly century-old Woodland Theater. 

The theater exemplifies the Stumbletown scrappiness. Since opening as a silent movie theater in 1926, the Woodland Theater building has lived many lives. As the Vintage West Woodland blog writes, the space has also been home to a medical-device maker, print shop and concert venue. In 1959, three men briefly turned the building into an indoor ski slope known as the Woodland Ski Arena. 

More recently, the theater was the Josephine, an underground performance space that shuttered in 2015. Today, it’s the Woodland Theater once again, though it now primarily functions as a studio space for artists. (The theater’s current and previous management did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Along with these well-loved West Woodland haunts, newer spots like neighborhood bar The Dray or Mainstay Provisions’ cafe and market, provide places for people to gather in ways Ballard’s old bakeries and the bowling alley did, according to LeBlanc, the former Ballard News Tribune contributor. He sees them as quintessential third places, the urbanism term for community spaces where people gather outside of work and home.

“[The neighborhood] just does have a homey feel to it and it’s where I’ll meet up with friends for a drink or coffee,” said Lex Vaughn, founder of the satirical Seattle news site The Needling and former Seattle Times reporter. She has lived near Stumbletown for eight years and is a regular at Cafe Bambino and the newer Mainstay Provisions. 

All of the area’s history has contributed to a special sliver of Seattle where the new and old coexist to make a great place to stumble to — alcohol optional.

“It’s just one of those areas that highlights how great it is to have little pockets of businesses embedded in your neighborhood that you can just walk to,” Vaughn said. “I endlessly appreciate areas like that.”