Old Town, Anacortes: The Streets This Town Started On

Old Town is the original Anacortes: the lettered avenues and numbered streets laid out around Commercial Avenue on the north end of Fidalgo Island, between Guemes Channel and the hill. On the county's books the plat is simply the "Map of the City of Anacortes." The homes on this plat were built, as I put it in my neighborhoods guide, when fishing and lumber were king. A lot of them are still standing and still loved.

Here is where the lines fall. Old Town runs west of Commercial Avenue, from 12th Street north to the water, and out to about D Avenue. Commercial itself, with the Historic Downtown Anacortes arch at 10th Street, is downtown, and Cap Sante is the headland to the east. Two of the best views of Old Town are from above it: the Cap Sante overlook, and the rooftop deck of the Majestic Hotel on Commercial Avenue, both looking down over these streets to the water.

Walk from the Guemes ferry landing at 500 I Avenue up to Commercial Avenue and you have crossed most of it. The murals, the shops, the coffee, the museum in the old Carnegie library at 8th Street, and the waterfront parks are all inside the neighborhood, not near it.

Old Town homes are older, with more character and more maintenance, and the lots are smaller. That is the whole trade: character, walkability, and history in exchange for upkeep and less yard. Some have been carefully restored. Some are waiting for the next person to do it.

I represented the buyers of a 1959 home on 7th Street here, on lots from the original city plat in a block the county notes for its island and channel view, and the lesson is the same one I give every Old Town client: the inspection matters more, and the honest condition conversation happens before the price conversation, not after. An old house priced like a renovated one sits. An old house priced for what it is finds its person quickly.

Causland Memorial Park at 710 N Avenue is two acres of 1920s mosaic stone walls, terraces, a bandstand, and an amphitheater, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Kiwanis Waterfront Park at 1708 6th Street looks across Guemes Channel at the island and the ferry traffic. The Depot Arts and Community Center at 611 R Avenue, the old Great Northern train depot, is where the Saturday farmers market sets up from May through October, and the W.T. Preston snagboat sits at the Maritime Heritage Center at 703 R Avenue. The Tommy Thompson Parkway starts at 11th Street and runs 3.3 paved miles down Fidalgo Bay and across the old railroad trestle to March Point Road. The library is at 1220 10th Street.

Two things I want on the record about Old Town, from someone who lives here: the library is in Old Town, and so are the restaurants people drive across the county for. When you walk out your door here, dinner is on foot.

The Anacortes School District serves the city, and it is a non-boundary district: the district itself assigns each elementary student to Fidalgo, Island View, or Mount Erie on class size, sibling placement, parent preference, and transportation, not on street address, and sends the assignment by email in the summer. Anacortes Middle School, Anacortes High School, and Cap Sante High School serve the whole city, so no address on this page comes with a guaranteed elementary school, and I do not pretend otherwise. The Whitney Early Childhood Education Center is the district's preschool building.

By the road from the middle of Old Town, it is 3.8 miles to the Anacortes ferry terminal, 0.2 to 10th and Commercial, 17 to the Burlington I-5 exit, 41 to downtown Bellingham. These are road miles from OpenStreetMap routing, measured September 2026, by road and not by ferry.