Town Center: Heritage Park Master Plan & Alley Activation

The City of Sumner was recently recommended to receive funding from Pierce County Lodging Tax to construct Hops Alley and the north point of Heritage Park. Construction is slated to begin in early 2025 and should wrap up by the end of 2025. We will continue to work with neighboring businesses to navigate the construction.

The City of Sumner applied for a and was given a Conditional Use Permit (CUP-2024-0005) for the phased redevelopment of the Reuben A. Knoblauch Heritage Park block. The associated files are also available in the documents section under CUP-2024-0005 folder.

Background:

In 2022-2023, JETT Landscape Architecture + Design worked with us and all of you to re-imagine Reuben Knoblauch Heritage Park as a more active, useful heart of the city, for special events and every day use. They also designed improvements for the adjacent alley, naming it Hops Alley, to serve as a flexible event space and for a more accessible and inviting parking area for its day use.

At 30% design, the resulting concepts are here for you to explore in photos and videos. Now, in 2024, JETT continues that design so that we have plans for both the alley and park ready for construction in the future. This design phase is funded with a grant from Pierce County Lodging Tax. Please continue to visit this page and provide input as we move closer to making these concepts a reality for downtown Sumner.

These redesigns originated in 2020-2021 with the Main Street Visioning Plan, which you can still visit. That plan also identified rebuilding the roads around Heritage Park as plaza-level woonerfs, which was completed in 2023 as part of the Town Center Utility Woonerf project. It also prioritized purchasing the last privately held portion of the block at 902 Kincaid, which the City completed in 2022.

To get updates on this project make sure to subscribe at the bottom right column of this page.