Most of Seattle marks the start of hockey season on October 1, when the Kraken open an 84-game schedule. Northgate starts three weeks earlier, on a weekday morning in the middle of September, in a building with three sheets of ice at 10601 5th Ave NE. Rookie camp opens September 11. The full squad reports to training camp on September 17. By the time anyone downtown has scanned a ticket, the busiest stretch of the year on this block has already come and gone.
That timing is not trivia. If you live in Maple Leaf, Pinehurst, Licton Springs, or anywhere within walking distance of the old mall, the Kraken Community Iceplex is the reason your corner of North Seattle has a demand curve that runs from 6 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, in a place that used to empty out when the department stores closed. And once you notice that, the leasing announcements coming out of Northgate Station stop reading like a list and start reading like a strategy.
The two weeks that fill the building
Late-August fan coverage reported the 2026 camp sequence this way:
- September 11: rookie camp opens at the Iceplex
- September 12 and 13: rookies travel to Abbotsford, B.C. for a prospect showcase against Vancouver's rookies
- September 17: training camp begins, with roster battles that decide who is on the ice October 1
- September 19 and 24: home preseason games against Vancouver and Calgary
- September 20 and 26: road preseason games in Calgary and Vancouver
Two caveats before you build a Saturday around any of it. Camp dates move, sometimes by a day or two, so treat the team's own camp page as the authority rather than a calendar you screenshotted in August. And the home preseason games are downtown at Climate Pledge Arena, not here. What happens in Northgate is practice, which is the part worth your attention anyway.
The free thing almost nobody uses
Select regular-season Kraken practices on the Starbucks Rink are free and open to the public. Not discounted. Free, with no ticket, in a rink that seats 600. Doors open 30 minutes before the published start, seating is first come and first served, everyone passes through a magnetometer and bag screening, and practices typically run 30 to 45 minutes. Fans get a day-of voucher for 10 percent off at 32 Bar & Grill, the hockey bar inside the building with 17 monitors going.
Set 600 seats against what a regular-season game seats and the math explains itself. Practice viewing is a neighborhood-scale event that happens inside a professional facility, which is exactly the kind of thing residents forget exists three months after the novelty wears off. Schedules shift day to day based on the team's needs, so the practice viewing page is a day-of check, not a plan-ahead one.
The three-hour parking rule that catches people
If you are staying longer than three hours, register your vehicle with the QR codes posted in the lots and use the code "Kraken." Northgate Station charges non-Iceplex patrons for longer stays, and that is the single most common way a free morning turns into a paid one. Arriving by Link is simpler: the nearest station entrance is on the west side, near the Virginia Mason Franciscan Health medical pavilion. Bike racks sit outside the east entrance.
Ice that has nothing to do with the Kraken
The building runs roughly 6 a.m. to midnight daily, and you do not pay anything to walk in the door. Public skate sessions land over lunch hours, on weekends, and in the evenings. Rental skates are $6.50, and skate aids run $9.50, either the Bobby the Seal sleds or the walkers, which matters if you are bringing a five-year-old who has never been on ice. Everything requires an active Dash account, so set that up at the kitchen table rather than at the guest services desk.
Two programs deserve more attention than they get. Tot Play Hour puts balls and piles of snow out on the ice for the youngest skaters, with the option of sneakers or boots instead of blades. And the sensory-friendly public skates run with limited attendance, softened lighting, and minimum noise levels, with free loaner sensory bags containing fidget tools, noise-cancelling headphones, and weighted lap pads, plus a quiet room reserved when the locker room schedule allows.
Fall Learn to Skate and Emerald Edge figure skating classes are open for registration now, which is the practical September action item for families. One more thing locals routinely miss: this is also the training facility for the Seattle Torrent, the Professional Women's Hockey League franchise that started play in the 2025-26 season. Three rinks, 1,000 seats at the main one and 400 at each of the others, and two professional teams working out of them.
You can read the hockey clock in the leases
Here is where the thesis pays off. Supreme Dumplings, a Seattle-born chain with locations in Bellevue, Kirkland, and South Lake Union, is opening at Northgate Station with a design it has not used anywhere else: an ice hockey theme, an oversized bar with large screens tuned to live games, and a year-round all-season patio. Door handles made from hockey-puck material. Puck-and-stick lettering. The company's lion mascot rendered on the wall with a hockey stick in its mouth. Designer Joseph Hsu told What Now Seattle the concept came directly from discovering the Kraken practice facility sat nearby.
A restaurant does not spend money on custom door handles for a team that plays its home games four miles away. It spends that money for the youth leagues, the figure skaters, the drop-in hockey crowd, and the parents who are in that building twice a week from September through spring.
The chain targeted an August opening and now appears in the center's dining directory, so check before you make the drive. Behind it, Simon has announced Shake Shack, Mendocino Farms, and Joe & The Juice for 2027. The center's own leasing materials now list all three national names alongside Supreme Dumplings as the local favorite, which is the pairing the landlord is betting on.
National fast-casual brands underwrite leases against predictable weekday traffic. A mall block does not generate that on its own anymore. A three-rink facility programmed from dawn to midnight does.
The thing that still isn't here
Watch what has not been leased and you get the honest version of the neighborhood's progress. Simon's next building, known as M1, is planned at seven stories and 268 units with roughly 35,600 square feet of retail, and the drawings indicate a large north-facing market of about 30,000 square feet on that end. A compact grocery store, in other words. The original Northgate Mall never had one. The project went to a design review recommendation meeting in late April 2026, and no tenant has been named and no schedule exists, so treat it as a line on a plan rather than a delivery date.
Meanwhile the housing keeps landing. Simon's Everis building, 234 apartments over 569 parking stalls, topped out and was nearing move-in this summer, with a second phase next door bringing the pair to 420 apartments wrapped around a shared garage. That works out to a parking ratio above one stall per unit, next door to a station serving both the 1 Line and the 2 Line, which tells you something about how the developer reads its future residents. On the King County land beside the station, Copperleaf Northgate opened April 21, 2026 with 235 apartments, and a ground-floor childcare center with adjacent commercial space is slated to open later this year.
The pattern underneath all of it: Northgate's development pipeline was reported at more than 4,000 homes back in 2021, and much of it has been built, but the majority landed east along 5th Ave NE rather than at the station itself, where the land belongs to Simon and King County Metro and has moved slowly. Metro's remaining five-acre parcel still has no timeline. That is why one side of the walk feels finished and the other still feels like a construction fence, and why the restaurants are arriving before the groceries.
Where a Thursday night actually goes
The Iceplex empties into Thornton Place, which is the part of Northgate that has quietly worked for fifteen years. Watershed Pub & Kitchen sits at 10104 3rd Ave NE, one block from the Link station, with a dog-friendly patio, a private mezzanine that takes groups of 15 to 35, trivia nights, and plant-based, gluten-free, and alcohol-free options on the menu. Parking is free and time-limited on the street, with the Thornton Place garage and the transit center lot across 3rd Ave NE as backup. Jewel Box Café has been on that block more than a decade, pulling Zoka espresso and turning out sweet and savory crepes, bubble tea, and pastries from Essential Baking and Bagel Oasis. Kizuki Ramen & Izakaya, Tengu Sushi, and Thai Fusion Bistro round out the walk, and Regal Thornton Place runs IMAX and ScreenX if the evening needs a second act.
On the Simon side, Stanford's holds down the corner of Northgate Way and First Ave alongside Chipotle, Red Robin, Barnes & Noble, and Nordstrom Rack. Further out, the John Lewis Memorial Bridge takes you over I-5 to North Seattle College on foot or by bike, and the Northgate library branch, the community center, the skatepark, and the Thornton Creek corridor fill in the rest of a weekend. If you want something newer, The Infatuation's openings guide flagged Nomad Manti, a north-end Central Asian counter working in manti, plov, and khoshany, with a warning that dishes sell out early.
The useful way to hold all of this: Northgate is no longer a mall with a neighborhood attached to it. It is a neighborhood with a professional sports facility as its most reliable weekday anchor, and the retail, the housing, and eventually the grocery store are all being underwritten against that fact. Homeowners here have watched a decade of construction fencing without a clean explanation of what it was building toward. The September practice schedule is that explanation, in the most literal form available.
If you own here and you are trying to work out what the next phase of that build-out means for your own block, Seattle Home Guide tracks these corners parcel by parcel across Shoreline and North Seattle. Get your free home valuation and let's talk about what your address looks like from here.
