Big changes could be coming for one of the Pacific Northwest's top tourism destinations, as the town of Leavenworth weighs whether to remove cars entirely from its iconic main street. The Bavarian-themed community, tucked east of the Cascades in Washington state, draws a stunning three million visitors a year, and officials are now studying how to turn its central street into a true pedestrian plaza.
What began as a marketing ploy in the 1960s has come to define the now world-famous town, where alpine architecture and a deliberately Bavarian look set it apart from anywhere else in the region. Mayor Carl Flory says he is determined to bring the town even closer to Bavaria, describing a plan to essentially redo the entire downtown rather than make piecemeal tweaks.
The current debate has roots in the pandemic. At the height of the COVID summer of 2020, the mayor mandated that streets be closed to allow for social distancing, and the barricades that went up then have remained in place ever since. What has not changed, however, are the streets themselves, which were designed for cars rather than for people on foot.
The central question now, officials say, is how to take a street that has simply been closed to traffic and transform it into a genuine pedestrian plaza. That would mean saying goodbye to curbs and hello to pavers, reshaping the surface so it works for visitors walking through the heart of town rather than for vehicles passing along it.
Artists' renderings give a sense of what could be in store. The town is eyeing a series of upgrades, including overhead string lights, umbrella seating and terraces built toward the sledding hill, along with the more ambitious idea of heated streets that could melt away the winter snow that draws so many visitors during the colder months.
Officials say the inspiration is being drawn directly from the Rhineland, with some members of the team having traveled to Bavaria about a year ago to study old Bavarian towns up close. The goal, they explain, is to keep giving people fresh reasons to return to a place that has built its identity around an immersive European feel.
For now, the project remains firmly in the design phase, and the mayor cautions that it will likely be two to three years before the big changes start to take shape. The cost is still a major unknown, with Flory acknowledging it will not come cheap, while insisting the town does not want to do it cheaply either. Some store owners, he says, believe it could be the biggest thing to happen to Leavenworth since it became Bavarian.