City of Olympia piloting expanded outdoor dining at 222 Market
If you spent time downtown last weekend, you may have noticed that people eating seafood have replaced parked cars outside the 222 Market on Capitol Way.
The closed-off parking is part of a city experiment in offering businesses more space for outdoor dining by closing streets – or parts of streets, at least.
It works like this: the owners of 222 Market leased the parking spaces at no charge from the city, which provided six picnic tables to the building that houses Chelsea Farms Oyster Bar, Sofie’s Scoops, the Bread Peddler, and Dos Hermanos Mexican Kitchen.
“We felt it was a good spot to try this pilot out because the market lost a lot of interior space to social distancing and other COVID-era realities,” said Mark Rentfrow, economic development liaison for the city of Olympia.
The bike lane on Capitol Way also acts as a natural buffer between diners and traffic, Rentfrow said, which cut down on the “heartburn” among the city’s traffic personnel.
Shina Wysocki, the co-owner of Chelsea Farms Oyster Bar, says the additional space allows more room to socially distance tables without encroaching on pedestrian sidewalk access.
It also brings back some of the lively downtown neighborhood feel that was lost in the shutdown.
“It feels more like the Olympia of before, with all kinds of different people using downtown,” Wysocki said.
Back in May, the city’s economic development officials met with downtown business owners to look for ways to help struggling businesses adapt to the governor-ordered business shutdown to slow the spread of COVID-19.
One of the ideas floated was closing off some downtown streets to make more room for restaurants to expand and socially distance dining tables, as other cities across the county have done.
Wysocki remembers seeing what cities like Seattle and New York were doing — closing whole streets to create outdoor pedestrian plazas — and thinking, why not do this here?
Rentfrow said he gets a lot of inquiries referencing street closures and other pedestrian projects cities across the country are piloting to reimagine how to apportion public space.
“We know that other cities are doing these sorts of things, and it’s not for a lack of wanting to,” Rentfrow said.
Several different downtown streets were studied for entire street closure, but logistical problems with fire, trash, and other access bogged those plans down, Rentfrow said.
There were plans to do a one-day test run of closing Washington Street between 4th and 5th avenues to vehicles, but they were scrapped after Gov. Inslee announced a 10-person limit on gatherings for counties such as Thurston in Phase 3 of his Safe Start reopening plan.
Another possibility going forward is using alleys for socially distanced outdoor dining. North-south alleys are better suited for this, Rentfrow said, because trash collection only uses east-west alleys.
For the shops in the market, even the car-length of space offers more options.
Previously, Sofie’s Scoops and the Bread Peddler had no outdoor seating at all, except for one park bench on the sidewalk.
“This may not be a huge thing, but it’s a start,” Wysocki said. “Hopefully we can be using our city the best we can to offer people spaces to be outside and gather.”
This story was originally published September 4, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
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