Aurora Village, Past and Present

There’s an “Aurora Village” in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, one in Cayuga County, New York, and another in South Africa, but those aren’t the ones I’m talking about.

Our Aurora Village was one of the earlier malls, once hosting Frederick & Nelson, Penney’s, Ernst, Pay’n’Pak, and Nordstrom. When Alderwood Mall opened and Frederick’s ran into its terminal troubles and closed the store that seemed to signal the end of Aurora Village- or more accurately a new phase. All the original buildings were demolished in the early nineties.

 and now dominate the retail landscape there. The ‘natural’ accretion of other retail has ringed them with more stores and restaurants and a 200-car Park-and-Ride serving a dozen Metro and Community Transit routes, including the southern terminus of Community Transit’s Swift Bus Rapid Transit. Multifamily housing surrounds it.

But for all that, Aurora Village is just the northwest corner of the Echo Lake Neighborhood. Historically, Echo Lake, like the rest of the region, was logged off. A shingle mill stood on the lakeshore. Later it became a resort, a big draw from all around for its swimming beach, which closed in 1966, and now it’s a retail and apartment center, with the new Dale Turner Family YMCA in the midst of a great deal of new residential construction. The Aurora Corridor Project, with its trendsetting storm water design, and Sky Nursery’s onsite water treatment will materially improve the quality of runoff reaching Echo Lake.

As I wrote back in December “North 165th Street to North 205th Street are designed to make full use of natural treatment systems for rain runoff, including bioswales, rain gardens, ecology embankments, root boxes and filterra systems to extract toxins from storm flow by natural means.” The lake itself has come full circle and is now a state-certified Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary.

Oddly, the official neighborhood border is Aurora Avenue, N 185^th St., N 205^th St., and I-5, which matches neither the intuitive, historical boundary nor the natural watershed boundaries, both about Fremont Ave N to Meridian Ave. N. and N 185^th St. to N. 205^th St.       

Instead, the east side of Aurora is Echo Lake Neighborhood and the west is Hillwood. I mean, Aurora is a big road, and probably made a good line for a map, but everyone on the west side of Aurora north of 185^th knows they’re in Aurora Village/Echo Lake.

I have to give solid props to the Echo Lake Neighborhood Association and their website. They do a wonderful job of celebrating and unifying their home and explaining to the rest of us why it’s a great place to live and shop. Here is a neighborhood doing all it can to become the best place it can be.