This morning's farmers market set up in Town Center the way it has most weekends this season, stalls lining the streets near Mercerdale Park. But the walk from the market to the corner of 77th and 78th Avenues Southeast looks different than it has in years. The construction fencing that has wrapped that block since 2024 is gone. In its place is a finished courtyard, brick facades, and a building called Lunara that is, for the first time, actually occupied. A few blocks north, the light rail platform that opened back in March is running trains that didn't exist a year ago.
Neither of these facts is news by itself. A building finishing construction is a construction story. A transit line opening is a transit story. What connects them is timing: two of the longest-unfinished threads in this neighborhood's recent history both closed out in the same six months, on the same three blocks, after running on separate clocks that had nothing to do with each other. That timing is what changes what the empty storefronts nearby actually mean right now.
The Building That Waited Fourteen Years
The site where Lunara now stands sat at the center of a fight that started in 2015, when a developer named Hines proposed a five-story building there with at least 150 homes and a high-end grocery store. A resident group called Save Our Suburbs organized against it, pushing the city council toward a building moratorium in Town Center. The Hines project collapsed under the opposition and the parcel sat unbuilt for years, still holding the businesses that had occupied it, including MudBay and Tiger Garden Chinese Restaurant.
A new ownership and design team picked the site back up in 2018, working with Johnston Architects on a smaller version under the name Xing Hua, four stories instead of five, no grocery anchor. The Design Commission approved the design in February 2021. Demolition of the old businesses started in 2024, and construction wrapped this summer under the project's final name, Lunara, with 146 apartments ranging from studios to three-bedroom units. Johnston Architects partner Megan McKay, who lives on the island, called the project "a privilege of a lifetime," describing a design that drew on Mercer Island's own network of community parks to organize the building around a central courtyard.
What opened this summer is smaller than what could have been built a decade ago, before the moratorium fight traded scale for delay. It's also, finally, real. As of the city's own spring construction update, Lunara's roughly 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space still had no publicly announced tenants. The building's management company was still working the leases.
The Line That Made the Empty Storefronts Worth Filling
None of this would matter as much if Town Center weren't also newly reachable without a car. Mercer Island Station opened this spring, on March 28, with the launch of cross-lake 2 Line light rail service, connecting the island directly to Seattle and the Eastside for the first time in its history. The Urbanist's analysis of the island's downtown buildout puts the scale in context: since 2010, Town Center had added 549 housing units, a little over 25,000 square feet of commercial space, and 690 parking stalls. Lunara alone adds 146 of those units and roughly 11,000 of that commercial square footage, pushing the district's totals since 2010 to 695 units and more than 36,000 square feet of commercial space.
The city started preparing for the transit crowd before the trains ever ran. In the summer of 2025, it opened a new 33-stall Town Center Parking Area on the site of the old, vacant Tully's Coffee building at the end of East Sunset Highway, a $2.45 million project awarded to OMA Construction. City Manager Jessi Bon framed it at the time as part of a broader effort to support future transit access while limiting the impact on Town Center. Alongside the new lot, the city has been rolling out two-hour free parking throughout Town Center, aimed at turning spaces over faster so more visitors can actually find one.
Put the pieces next to each other and the sequence stops looking like coincidence. A train station that removes the need to drive off the island. A parking policy designed to keep spaces open for the people who still do. And, finally, a building with retail space sitting empty and waiting, after a decade in which nobody could build anything to put a tenant into in the first place.
What's Actually Moving Into the Space
Lunara's own ground-floor spaces are the one piece still missing from this picture. The next round of leasing announcements there, whenever they come, is worth watching over the coming months.
Elsewhere in Town Center, the churn has already started. Danji Korean Cuisine, which operates a flagship location in Issaquah, has filed to open a second location at 2707 78th Avenue SE, though no opening date has been made public yet. Alister and Crawlspace Gastro Pub have added new dining options to a strip that already includes Pogacha for wine and Mioposto for pizza. Riot Games' long-anticipated arrival of employees to its island offices has put new faces at lunch counters around downtown this year as well.
None of this displaces what was already working. Some of these businesses have anchored Town Center for years, including Pagliacci, which has been serving pizza from its corner near Mercerdale Park since 2016. The full list residents build a week around includes:
- Metropolitan Market and two QFC locations for groceries
- Island Books, with Homegrown next door for lunch
- Barrels Wine Bar and the Mercer Island Florist
- Hap's Burgers and Taps and Sushi Joa
- Pagliacci and Mioposto for pizza
- Macrina Bakery, La Fête Pâtisserie Française, and L'Experience Paris for coffee and pastry
- Orangetheory Fitness for the mornings that need it
The new arrivals are stacking on top of that base, not replacing it.
This Week, on the Ground
Today's date happens to line up with more than just Lunara's finished courtyard. The Mercer Island Farmers Market's own fall calendar lists September 27 as one of its remaining dates this season, with more scheduled into October. The First Friday Art Walk keeps its usual monthly rhythm too, with local businesses opening their doors to rotating exhibitions from regional artists.
Anyone at this morning's market can walk from the produce stalls to Lunara's finished courtyard to the light rail platform without leaving Town Center, something that wasn't true a year ago. That's the part worth noticing. Not any single opening, but how many separate, decade-long clocks just happened to run out at once.
If you're watching how Town Center's changes are shaping value on the surrounding blocks, Stephen Snee has been tracking Mercer Island and the wider Lake Washington shoreline long enough to know which of these shifts tend to matter and which are just noise. Let's Connect.
