Walk the corner of Main Street and Bothell Way this month and you will notice the murals before you notice anything else. Fresh color on the canvases at Triangle Junction, food truck lines at lunch, a kid pointing at a wall that wasn't painted last time you walked past. What most people walking through don't clock is what's happening a few feet under their shoes: the ground beneath that plaza is still being cleaned up.
That's not a metaphor. Triangle Junction sits on a parcel the city calls Lot EFG, and the city's own page for the space says it plainly: while crews clean up the soil and groundwater under the lot, the plaza above it functions as a temporary activation connecting downtown businesses, Main Street, and the Park at Bothell Landing. The murals, the Pop Shops, the flowerpots and picnic tables, all of it opened on October 11, 2025, as a way to give the corner a pulse while the underground work continues. The art you're looking at isn't decorating a finished civic space. It's decorating a waiting room.
That distinction matters if you live near downtown, because it explains why this stretch of Bothell keeps changing shape every few months instead of settling into something permanent, and why this fall is a genuinely good window to see it before it shifts again.
Why the plaza exists at all
Lot EFG used to be a gap. The city's description of the site before activation calls it "a big, empty lot" that separated important downtown spaces from each other. In 2021, City Council authorized building the Pop Shops on Main there to support small business recovery during COVID. By 2024, staff had run community engagement on what to do with the rest of the lot, and council directed a phased build-out that included four additional Pop Shops. The plaza opened fully in October 2025, built explicitly as a placeholder for the years the underlying remediation would take.
The city hasn't been quiet about wanting more from that corner long-term, either. It has been assembling adjacent parcels on Main Street for a bigger redevelopment down the road, including the former site of the Gallo De Oro restaurant at 10015 Main Street, vacant since 2020, and the neighboring parcel at 10007 Main Street, which currently houses a still-operating Baskin-Robbins. Put those pieces together and the picture is a downtown block that the city is actively consolidating for something larger, with Triangle Junction as the visible, art-filled bridge between now and whenever that plan lands.
What's actually new on the wall
The murals themselves came out of a specific call. Bothell's Arts Commission invited local visual and literary artists with strong community ties to submit work under the theme "Intersection," asking for pieces that read as community, relationships, history, journeys, landscapes, or shared experience. Selected artists received stipends, there was no application fee, and submissions closed in March. The city's Triangle Junction page confirms the first artists have been chosen and the murals are underway.
They're not the first art to land there this year. In mid-August, the plaza hosted Blades of Change, a mosaic festival where artists Myron Curry, Jamee Linton, and Sloane Miller spent the afternoon transforming three recycled wind turbine blades into large-scale painted works while singer-songwriter Zan Fiskum, a top-nine finalist from season 18 of The Voice, played live. Those finished blades are staying put as a permanent installation on the plaza, which means the turbine pieces and the newer "Intersection" murals will be sharing the same small stretch of pavement this fall.
A short walk from Triangle Junction, there's a second, quieter mural worth finding. Seattle Children's Alyssa Burnett Adult Life Center ran a Mural Arts class this year with adults on the autism spectrum, and the finished piece, funded by the city, now hangs near the junction. It layers a topographical map of Bothell under community words, traffic lights, and flowers, built around the same idea of intersection that the commission's official call later picked up.
The one afternoon to see it come together
The clearest chance to watch this all connect is Saturday, September 26. Bothell's Sustainamania festival returns for its 14th year that day, running 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at City Hall, with free activities for all ages, a Repair Café staffed by WSU Sustainable Community Stewards, food trucks, and live music from Million Dollar Nile. The festival is sponsored in part by Make Apothecary, the downtown creative shop, along with UW Bothell and BEA Environmental. Immediately after, at 2 p.m., the city is holding a Mural Dedication at Triangle Junction to formally introduce the newest pieces and the artists behind them.
| Stop | What's there | When |
|---|---|---|
| Bothell City Hall | Sustainamania festival, live music, Repair Café | Sept 26, 10 a.m.–2 p.m. |
| Triangle Junction | Mural Dedication for the new "Intersection" murals | Sept 26, 2 p.m. |
| Triangle Junction | Blades of Change turbine-blade sculptures (permanent) | Ongoing |
| Near Triangle Junction | Alyssa Burnett Adult Life Center mural | Ongoing |
| Park at Bothell Landing | Fishing Frog by William Schlough, Salmon Sculpture by Reed Peck-Kriss | Ongoing |
That two-event pairing, festival then dedication, means you can spend a Saturday morning at City Hall and walk straight into the unveiling without changing plans.
Where to keep going after that
If the dedication puts you in the mood to see more, downtown Bothell has enough art scattered around it that an afternoon can turn into a full loop.
- Willard Art and Frame functions as both a gallery and a framing shop, with a rotating selection of work by regional artists.
- Make Apothecary, besides sponsoring Sustainamania, runs watercolor, drawing, and paint-making workshops out of its downtown space.
- The Bothell City Hall Gallery rotates exhibitions from local artists and is open to walk in during regular building hours.
- Bothell's Public Art Walking Tour, a self-guided story map maintained by the city, maps out murals, sculptures, and installations across town and adds new stops as they go up.
- The Park at Bothell Landing carries two standing sculptures worth the short walk from Triangle Junction: Fishing Frog by William Schlough and a Salmon Sculpture by Reed Peck-Kriss.
The city has also kept the pipeline open for what comes next. This summer, it closed applications for a new Downtown District Artist Roster through 4Culture, open to professional visual artists from King and Snohomish counties working in murals, installation, sculpture, and more, explicitly framed as a place-based strategy to strengthen downtown's identity and pull more foot traffic to local businesses. Whoever gets pulled from that roster is likely to end up somewhere in this same few blocks.
Worth seeing now, not eventually
None of this is permanent, and that's the point worth sitting with. The murals at Triangle Junction are there because the ground under them is still being fixed, and the plaza itself is a bridge to whatever comes after the city finishes assembling the block around it. The turbine blades and the "Intersection" murals will keep their spot for a while, but a lot on this scale rarely stays a plaza forever once the parcels it's tied to are ready to move.
If you've been putting off a walk through downtown Bothell, September 26 is a reasonable day to stop putting it off. Catch Sustainamania in the morning, walk over for the 2 p.m. dedication, and take in a version of Triangle Junction that won't necessarily look the same in a year or two.
Following what's changing on a specific block, and understanding why, is the same instinct that matters when you're deciding whether a home two streets over still makes sense for your life. If you're weighing that kind of decision in Bothell, Kirkland, or Bellevue, Nick Loveless Real Estate knows this corridor block by block. Work With Nick.
