The Two Parking Spots That Explain All of Woodway

Saturday morning, August 15, and the lot at Town Hall is already full. Not because Woodway has a stadium or a shopping district drawing crowds. It has neither. It has an annual Town Fair, a stretch of grass at 23920 113th Place W., and roughly 1,300 residents who all seem to know exactly when to show up. By 9:45, the walk from your car takes longer than the walk to the punch bowl.

This happens every summer, and it happens because of something most people who drive through Woodway never notice: this town runs on scarcity by design. Not scarcity of money. Scarcity of the ordinary things that soak up a community's attention elsewhere: no commercial strip, no traffic signal, and, as it turns out, a public trail system that quite literally shares two parking spaces with the town's only playground. Once you see that pattern, the whole place reads differently.

The Deed That Still Runs This Town

Woodway's founder, David Whitcomb Sr., bought the original 320 acres in the early 1910s with a specific idea of what a town should feel like. He wrote two-acre minimum lot sizes and generous setbacks into the deed restrictions from the start, and those restrictions never got softened. When development pressure from surrounding areas picked up in the early 1950s, residents didn't lobby for more infrastructure. They organized to incorporate as a fourth-class city instead, protecting the two-acre standard and keeping annexation by Edmonds off the table. The town was formally incorporated in 1958.

That single decision, made by people who wanted less commerce rather than more, is why Woodway still has no part of its land zoned commercial today. No grocery store. No coffee shop with a drive-through. If you live here, your errands happen somewhere else, and the town itself stays exactly the size it was built to be: 1.43 square miles, most of it either forest, water, or someone's very large lawn.

Twenty-Four Acres, Divided Deliberately

Woodway sets aside about 24 acres of parkland for a town this size, which sounds generous until you see how it's split. The two biggest pieces don't even operate on the same calendar.

Both halves sit inside what's now called the Carla Nichols Reserve, renamed in 2021 to honor the town's longtime mayor after her retirement that January. The name changed. The odd seasonal split didn't. If you want to walk the Central Reserve loop, you plan around summer, the same way you'd plan around a farmers market schedule somewhere else.

Then there's John Bush Play Area, the swings-and-climbing-rocks spot most families with young kids treat as the default meeting point. It has exactly two parking spaces, and those same two spaces serve as the access point for the Central Reserve trailhead. On a warm weekend afternoon, that means a stroller, a dog walker, and a family headed for the gazebo are all competing for the same curb.

The newest addition, Deer Creek Park, opened in 2016 near the Brown Owl Bridge. It gives the town a meadow, a picnic area, and exercise equipment along a trail that follows the Deer Creek watershed. It's the one green space here that doesn't share its parking with anything else, which residents who've circled John Bush a few too many times tend to notice.

The Argument Woodway Keeps Having

Ask a longtime resident what the town actually debates, and the answer isn't zoning variances or school boundaries. It's Point Wells, the industrial waterfront parcel bordering Woodway that the town formally annexed in 2024 after more than a decade of litigation and planning. The site has stored marine fuel and mixed asphalt for over a century, and the fight over what happens to it next has outlasted multiple mayors.

After the annexation vote, Mayor Mike Quinn said the town had "a great team to pull this all together and to build a stronger, more vibrant, and sustainable community." That optimism got tested almost immediately. Property owner Paramount asked Snohomish County for a code interpretation on whether it could keep running fuel and asphalt operations at Point Wells as a legally protected nonconforming use, and in January 2026 the county ruled largely in Paramount's favor, though the decision left open whether that same right survives now that part of the property sits inside Woodway's own jurisdiction rather than the county's. The zoning on the books calls the area an Urban Village. What's actually there, for now, is still an asphalt plant.

This is the kind of story that only shows up on a small town's radar because there's so little else competing for attention. The same council that spends its June meeting reviewing Willowick Road landscaping work also has to hold hearings on a waterfront industrial site with a legal history longer than most of its residents have lived in town. Scale that small, and everything gets watched closely.

The One Weekend That Proves the Rule

Which brings the story back to that packed lot on August 15. Woodway doesn't have a Main Street to fill on a Saturday, so when it wants its residents in one place, it builds the occasion instead of hoping foot traffic finds it. The Town Fair does that. So does the six-week window when the Central Reserve trails open. So, in its own way, does a council meeting where landscaping on one road gets its own line item.

None of this is an accident of small-town charm. It's the direct output of choices made in 1912, reinforced in 1958, and still showing up on a town council agenda in 2026. A place with no commercial zoning and no traffic signals has to build its gathering points on purpose, and Woodway has settled on a short list: one reserve with two seasons, one play area with two parking spots, and one Saturday morning in August when all of it comes together at once.

If you already live here, you've felt this rhythm without naming it. Understanding why it works this way, deliberately scarce rather than accidentally quiet, changes how you plan your own summer around it.

For neighborhood guides like this one, market updates, and local insight across Edmonds and the surrounding North Puget Sound communities, visit Adam Cobb.