Everett Station turns 10, city celebrates
EVERETT - Everett Station is turning 10 years old this year, and the city will celebrate with a party 2:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 10 at Everett Station, 3201 Smith Ave.
The transportation hub for Snohomish County has come a long way. Before Everett Station opened on Feb. 4, 2002, transit services made their stops in a hodgepodge of places.
Community Transit never connected at the same place as Everett Transit, and the Greyhound bus station was out at the corner of Pacific and Hoyt avenues.
Amtrak had a small depot near the intersection of Hewitt and Hoyt avenues.
Sound Transit’s Sounder train had yet to start, but now Everett Station is its key northern terminus. Sound Transit put in $5.3 million toward Everett Station specifically to bring the Sounder there.
The station also serves Skagit Transit and Island Transit buses.
The hub created ridership increases for all of the services that stop there, Everett Transit program manager Steffani Lillie said last week. Everett Transit runs Everett Station.
Everett Station’s brick and glass confines serve 6,000 people each day.
About 1,000 of Everett Transit’s 7,500 daily passengers go through Everett Station, Lillie said.
Everett Station is unique for having other organizations lease offices in Everett Station’s four-story building, Lillie said.
WorkSource, a state-run office for jobseekers, migrated to Everett Station when the site opened. More people are able to get to the site now.
“Over the past decade … 116,405 unique individuals received services from WorkSource Everett,” Workforce Development Council of Snohomish County spokeswoman Heather Villars wrote in an e-mail.
Everett Station’s meeting and rental facilities are populated with weekly events. The station’s big Weyerhaeuser Room, with its large murals of lumber workers, is booked about 140 times a year, Lillie said.
The station was the brainchild of former Mayor Ed Hansen, historian Kit Oldham wrote for HistoryLink.org.
The $27 million station was built largely with federal dollars. The total project cost was $44 million.
The federal government plans to invest money into Everett Station for the next 40 years. It will be here a long time, Lillie said.
The party on Friday, Feb. 10 will include speakers, food and the Carl Gipson Senior Center hula dancers. The band 20 Riverside, which named itself after an old bus route, will perform.
The city will unveil a new logo for Everett Station.
Sound Transit CEO Joni Earl will be among the event’s speakers.
The party is free to attend.
By MICHAEL WHITNEY
Published Feb. 8, 2012
