Urban city center · Downtown
Downtown Bellevue
Washington's second-largest city center, a dense high-rise core of offices, towers, and the Bellevue Collection shopping district.
Downtown Bellevue is the second-largest city center in Washington state, anchoring the Eastside with a skyline that ranks third in the Pacific Northwest behind Seattle and Portland. The district has more than 50,000 employees and roughly 12,000 residents, and its jobs base has grown by about 25 percent since 2015. A strict 600-foot height limit shapes the skyline; the 42-story Amazon-leased tower completed in 2023 was the first building to reach that cap.
The downtown core is headquarters or a major hub for employers including Paccar, Eddie Bauer, Valve, Bungie, SAP Concur, Symetra Financial, and Puget Sound Energy, while Redmond-based Microsoft is downtown Bellevue's single largest employer with thousands of workers in leased towers. Decades of high-rise residential and office construction transformed what was a low-rise suburban downtown into a vertical city center.
Retail and entertainment center on the Bellevue Collection, comprising Bellevue Square, Lincoln Square, and Bellevue Place, which together hold more than 200 shops and restaurants, department stores anchored by Nordstrom and Macy's, and a multiplex cinema. Downtown Park, with its crescent waterfall and canal, provides a major green space at the district's southwest edge.