Walk the Cross Kirkland Corridor on a quiet weekday afternoon and you will pass joggers, a few commuters on e-bikes, and long stretches of packed gravel with nothing but native plantings and the occasional bench. What you probably will not think about is that this trail, built on an old rail bed, is the only thing in Kirkland that already runs the full distance between the city's two separate art scenes. Most people who live here have visited one or the other. Almost nobody treats the corridor as the connective tissue it actually is, because until this fall, there wasn't a reason to.
That changes on September 26, when the Umbrella Fringe Festival lands at Kirkland Urban, roughly at the midpoint of the same corridor that links downtown's decades-old gallery row to the newer cluster near Totem Lake. It is a small scheduling fact with a bigger implication: for one weekend, the trail stops being a fitness loop and starts being the route.
Two Scenes That Have Never Had a Reason to Meet
Downtown Kirkland's art identity was built slowly, gallery by gallery, along Park Lane and the streets that fan out from Marina Park. It is old enough that some of the people running these spaces have been doing it for decades. Four miles north, near Totem Lake, a newer and smaller cluster grew up around different priorities: contemporary work, younger artists, gallery owners who came to the neighborhood more recently.
These two pockets have coexisted without much overlap. Downtown draws people already walking to dinner or the farmers market. Totem Lake draws people who specifically seek out contemporary and abstract work, because that is what the neighborhood's gallery is known for. There has been no single afternoon that gave a resident a reason to do both.
What's Already Downtown
Start at Kirkland Arts Center, on Market Street. Its gallery is the only free, professional nonprofit gallery on the Eastside, which means anyone can walk in on a Tuesday afternoon without planning around a ticket or an opening reception. A few blocks over, Parklane Gallery has been artist-owned for more than 24 years, with 37 member artists who take turns staffing the space themselves. Ask whoever is behind the counter about their own work and you will usually get an answer, because the person selling you a painting probably painted it.
The most recent addition to the downtown row is also its oldest name. Gunnar Nordstrom ran a gallery in Kirkland for years before relocating to Bellevue, and his return to a lakeside spot on Kirkland Avenue has been treated locally as something closer to a homecoming than a grand opening.
A short list of what's currently open downtown, for anyone plotting a route:
- Kirkland Arts Center Gallery, 620 Market Street
- Parklane Gallery, on Park Lane
- Gunnar Nordstrom Gallery, 92 Kirkland Avenue
The Scene Four Miles North
Up near Totem Lake, ryan james fine arts occupies a different niche entirely. Founded in 2011 by Ryan James and joined in 2014 by Jessica Kravitz, it is the only gallery on the Eastside built specifically around modern, abstract, and conceptual work, representing 25 local and emerging artists from Washington and beyond. It draws a different visitor than the downtown row, someone looking less for a lake-town watercolor and more for something that would not look out of place in a Belltown loft.
A bit further east, at Carillon Point on the water, NYB Gallery adds a third flavor to the mix. Founded by Nayoung Buchan, it operates as a contemporary and modern exhibition space in one of Kirkland's quieter waterfront pockets, the kind of gallery you find because someone told you about it rather than because you were walking past.
The Festival Landing in the Middle
Here is where the geography gets interesting. The Umbrella Fringe Festival, scheduled for September 26 at Kirkland Urban, sits roughly along the same stretch of the corridor that the trail description flags as the point where you pass Google's Kirkland campus. That puts the festival almost exactly between the downtown galleries and the ryan james fine arts space at Totem Lake, on the same trail that already links both.
The festival's connection to Kirkland's established art community is not incidental. Kirkland Arts Center's own executive director, David Lynx, has been previewing it directly to local listeners, teasing "the Fringe Festival" as one of the season's notable additions to the neighborhood's arts calendar. That is a downtown institution talking up an event happening at a different node on the map, which is a small but real signal that the city's two gallery scenes are starting to notice each other.
The Trail That Already Does the Work
None of this requires new infrastructure. The Cross Kirkland Corridor has been open for years as a 5.75-mile crushed gravel path running from the South Kirkland Park and Ride north through the Totem Lake business district, built on a rail line the city purchased in 2012. It has quarter-mile markers, scattered public art, and an amphitheater at Feriton Spur Park roughly midway along the route. It is flat enough for a stroller and wide enough that walkers and cyclists rarely feel like they are competing for space, though locals know the after-work hours between four and six can get crowded with commuters on bikes.
What the trail has never had is a reason to be walked end to end for art rather than exercise. That is what changes with a festival sitting near its midpoint and a downtown arts leader publicly pointing toward it.
How to Actually Spend the Day
If you wanted to test this out yourself, a reasonable version of the day looks like this. Start downtown, hit Kirkland Arts Center and Parklane Gallery before lunch, since both are an easy walk from Marina Park. Pick up the corridor trail heading north, stop at the amphitheater at Feriton Spur Park if you want a break partway through, and land at Kirkland Urban in time for the Fringe Festival on September 26. From there, ryan james fine arts is a short trip further north if you want to close the day with the neighborhood's most contemporary collection.
It is not a route anyone has needed to map before, because nothing gave downtown and Totem Lake a shared date on the calendar. This fall, for one weekend, they have one.
If you already call Kirkland home and want to keep a pulse on what is shifting here, from new local spots to the kind of neighborhood detail that never makes it into a listing photo, Shane Coulter & Anne Welch would love to stay in touch. And if a friend or family member ever asks you what it is actually like to live on this side of the lake, sending them our way for a conversation is always welcome.