A Fauntleroy Fall, By The People Who Actually Live Here
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
If you have lived in Fauntleroy for more than a season, you already know the tells. The Vashon line stretches past the low fence at the Endolyne end of 45th. The Colman Pool crowd thins out. The maples along California start turning before the ones down by the water. What is worth paying attention to this year is not the rhythm itself, which is familiar, but the fact that three separate clocks are running at once underneath it.
One is a 20-plus-year community ritual that is about to happen again. One is a small wave of food openings finally filling storefronts that sat empty. And one is a piece of state infrastructure at the foot of the neighborhood that is about to start changing in visible ways. Any single one of those is a normal fall update. Together they make this autumn the most interesting one Fauntleroy has had in a while.
The short version: the traditions are getting louder, the storefronts are getting fuller, and the ferry dock is about to start looking different. Plan your fall around all three.
Put Sunday, October 18, 2026 on the calendar. That is the Fauntleroy Fall Festival at the Schoolhouse, and the West Seattle Big Band's schedule pins it at 3:00 PM.
The origin story is worth remembering because it explains why the festival still feels the way it does. It began more than 20 years ago as a response to the unease that settled over the neighborhood after September 11, 2001, when the Fauntleroy Community Association decided a modest gathering of a few hundred neighbors might help rebuild something. It now draws over a thousand people and is still free.
The legacy activities have not changed: salmon hats, pumpkin painting, and birdhouse building. What has changed is who props it up. The current partner list reads like a directory of the neighborhood's small-business spine: DSquared Hospitality, Endolyne Joe's, Fauntleroy Children's Center, Fauntleroy Church UCC, the Fauntleroy Schoolhouse, Garden Coaching Solutions, Hazelwood, Pilates at Fauntleroy, The Birdhouse, West Seattle Nursery, and Wildwood Market. The dine-out fundraisers at Endolyne Joe's earlier in the year are what keep the ticket price at zero.
If you go, note the practical detail buried on the festival's own site: emergency culvert work has shifted a few of the popular attractions to new spots, so the map on the festival site is worth a look before you walk over.
Two openings are worth flagging because they filled spaces that had been quiet for a while.
La Casa del Sabor took over the small lot at 9256 45th Ave SW in June 2026, in the same spot El Camion vacated two years earlier. Co-owner Monica Trujillo Cortez and her sister had been looking in Renton before they discovered the Fauntleroy space was still available, and they signed a one-year lease to start. The menu is broad on purpose. Green chilaquiles and other breakfast plates open the day, and the rest of the board runs tacos, burritos, quesadillas, gorditas, mulitas, tostadas, nachos and tortas, everything made to order. Hours are 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., seven days a week, per the West Seattle Blog's reporting.
bel gatto, from the same ownership as Endolyne Joe's next door, revived the former Original Bakery space and did not touch the 85-year-old double-deck Rainier oven at its center. The daytime program is baked goods, Sicilian pizza by the slice or in three sizes, and Italian deli sandwiches and salads, with a small evening menu in a 28-seat dining room.
If you have been on autopilot for the last two years and defaulted to the same three places, the practical Fauntleroy short list now looks more like this:
Yelp's own snapshot of the area, updated last October, still lists Endolyne Joe's, Wildwood Market, The Birdhouse, West Seattle Fish House, The Westy, The Neighborhood, Banh Mi Xo, G.H. Pasta & Pizza, Grillbird and Young's as the top restaurants near 98136, which is a useful cross-check if you are trying to remember what is walkable from your block.
The park does not close for the season. It reorganizes.
Colman Pool, the heated outdoor saltwater pool tucked at the south end near the water, is a Memorial Day to Labor Day operation. Once it locks up, the character of a Lincoln Park visit shifts almost entirely to the trails. The park holds 4.6 miles of walking paths and 3.9 miles of bike trails across 135 acres, along with five picnic shelters and the seawall promenade that runs a mile above the beach.
Two things are worth knowing about fall specifically. The forested loop that most residents walk, roughly 1.5 miles through the Douglas firs and western red cedars above the bluff, is genuinely quiet in October and November on weekday mornings in a way it is not in July. And the beach at the base is rockier and less trafficked than Alki, which makes low tide a better time to look for what has washed up than to sunbathe on it.
Two other fall dates on the calendar for park users. The West Seattle Monster Dash stages out of Lincoln Park at 8611 Fauntleroy Way SW around Halloween. And GreenStage's Backyard Bard series has used the meadow near the north end of the main parking lot at 8011 Fauntleroy Way SW as one of its regular Shakespeare stops, though the 2026 mainstage run wrapped in mid-August.
If your fall commute or your Saturday morning routine touches Fauntleroy Way SW, this is the year to read the WSDOT signage carefully.
Washington State Ferries and SDOT are installing a new traffic signal at the intersection where the dock meets Fauntleroy Way SW, and per WSDOT's project page, construction of that intersection begins in Fall 2026. That is the smaller of two projects here, and it is meant to make walking, biking and driving in and out of the terminal safer before the bigger work starts.
The bigger work is the terminal replacement itself. The Federal Highway Administration signed off on the final Planning and Environmental Linkages study earlier this year, closing a five-year planning phase. WSF is moving forward with a design that adds dock length and lifts vehicle capacity from about 80 cars today to between 124 and 155, with construction scheduled to begin in 2028 and the new terminal opening around 2031. The current dock, built in the 1950s, serves more than 2.3 million riders a year on the Fauntleroy-Vashon-Southworth Triangle route.
What that means for the current resident:
For a homeowner between the Ferry Terminal and Endolyne, the practical read is that the immediate change is a traffic-pattern change, not construction next door.
| Date | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Late Aug – early Sept | Colman Pool closes for the season | Lincoln Park, south end |
| Weekdays through October | Forested loop is at its quietest | Lincoln Park |
| Fall 2026 | Ferry terminal signal construction begins | Fauntleroy Way SW at the dock |
| Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026, 3 p.m. | Fauntleroy Fall Festival | Fauntleroy Schoolhouse, 9131 California SW |
| Late October | West Seattle Monster Dash | Lincoln Park, 8611 Fauntleroy Way SW |
Neighborhoods change slowly, then all at once. Fauntleroy has spent a couple of quiet years with two prominent storefronts empty and a ferry-dock plan stuck in study. This fall, both of those move. The Original Bakery space is a working bakery again. The El Camion pad is a working food truck again. The state has a signed-off plan and a start date for the signal. And a festival that began as a response to a national low point is about to happen for its 20-something-consecutive year on a Sunday afternoon in October.
If you are a homeowner here, the useful move is small. Walk the loop in the forest on a Tuesday morning. Order the Sicilian by the slice from bel gatto and eat it on the bench outside Wildwood. Bring a kid to the Schoolhouse on the 18th and let them come home with a salmon hat. Read the WSDOT alerts when they come through your inbox instead of deleting them.
When you or a neighbor eventually does think about selling, moving up, or right-sizing inside the peninsula, the ground you are standing on will already feel legible. If it would help to talk through what any of these changes mean for a specific block or a specific house, Monroe Kemper is glad to sit down with you. Book a Consultation when the timing is yours.
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