Aurora

Aurora is less of a neighborhood and more of an old highway – a busy street, replete with run-down motels, automotive businesses, and fast food joints. Yet a neighborhood is emerging here.  We feel a particular call to helping make this happen.

Before you have a neighborhood and before you can know how to love your neighbor, you have to answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” Awake is learning that our neighbors live in motel rooms on Aurora and nice homes in Licton Springs and Greenwood. They attend AA and NA meetings at local cafes and get their groceries at the upscale PCC. They ride the 358 bus and jog around Green Lake. All of these different people are our neighbors!

Obviously, not all of our neighbors have websites, but some of our neighbors and local partners do:

Aurora Neighbors

Church of Aurora

History of Aurora

In a seattlepi.com blog post from July 2009, Leonard Garfield of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry shared a bit about the story of Aurora:

From at least 1913, Aurora Avenue was the major north-south arterial through Seattle for travelers en route north to Canada and south to California. In the 1920s, roadhouses and inns for weary car travelers became the most familiar feature of the strip. But the motel-ificication really took off in 1962 when the world was beating a path to Seattle’s door to see the wonders of Century 21, otherwise known as the Seattle World’s Fair. With Mom, Dad and the kids packed into the station wagon, and dog-tired from crossing the plains on the nation’s primitive interstate system, the motels on Aurora with their kitschy neon signs and ample parking seemed like a home-away-from home. In later years, the same motels have welcomed prostitutes and the temporarily homeless along with other travelers, and Aurora Avenue continues to be a well-traveled route and a well-worn place to rest for the night.