Jessie Stein knows the area well, but now she’s taken further strides in gaining a deeper understanding of Kenmore.

As a youngster, she attended Bothell High and worked her first job at Jet City Pizza on Northeast Bothell Way in Kenmore.

Last fall, Stein, 23, and four other University of Washington graduate students focused on Kenmore and Lake Washington as the latest design project of UW’s Advanced Urban Design Studio.

“I think we all kind of had the same vision of connecting Kenmore with the waterfront,” Stein said.

If not a basic assumption of the study, one obvious conclusion was that State Route 522 represents a huge obstacle to connecting the city and its residents to the lake.

So how does one go about getting around a major, regional thoroughfare? According to the study done by the urban-design students, one idea is to build a deck over the top of 522. Not only would the space allow easy access to the water including new parks and trails, it would create new property for commercial development.

And if that idea sounds a bit over the top, in some ways, it was meant to be.

“I told them (the students) to be bold and go for the big picture,” said UW professor Ron Kasprisin.

Added Stein, whose sports teams once practiced in Kenmore: “It was really interesting to kind of see the area from a different perspective — to actually understand what goes on, on site in Kenmore beyond just knowing of the school association I had with it.”

And while Kasprisin said the final visions might be grandiose, he also said each has embedded inside of it more pragmatic solutions or possibilities.

Kasprisin was slated to appear at a recent Kenmore City Council meeting to unveil his studio’s final visions, including an eight-square-foot model that eventually will be the city’s to keep. Hostile weather kept him away, but he hopes to be in front of local leaders sometime in April.

“From what I’ve seen,” Mayor David Baker said in regard to the study, “it’s got some real possibilities.”

Baker especially liked the idea of possibly using dredgings from Lake Washington to build recreational islands in Lake Washington. He admitted the idea might be hampered by a number of factors, including possible contamination of the dredgings. But like Kasprisin, he believes the overall study might contain some viable, doable, ideas.

Besides decking over 522, another idea by another student was to depress the roadway using a new rapid-transit station as a catalyst. According to graphics, the transit station would sit in the area of 522 and 67th Avenue Northeast.

Kasprisin said the project obviously would carry a huge price tag. Overall, he didn’t seem too optimistic about it ever actually happening.

“But it’s doable,” he added, hoping that if nothing else, the UW project gets people thinking about ways to get over and around 522.

One final student idea was to partially leave 522 as it is, reducing access and making it a true state route, one commuters use to get through Kenmore.

As for residents and others wishing to visit the city, the suggestion is to create a new major, thoroughfare out of Northeast 181st Street.

“It’s intriguing,” Kasprisin said of the notion, adding the new roadway would make the still-new Kenmore City Hall even more center stage and seemed in keeping with the city’s current plans for its downtown area.

All of the various student ideas have a few things in common, according to Kasprisin. One was a sort of loop road that runs from upper Kenmore, above 522, crosses that roadway and runs on the opposite side of the state route. Again, the idea is to connect Kenmore with the water as much as possible.

In terms of redeveloping the waterfront, the students called for restoration of wetlands along the shoreline.  The design study suggests a couple of ways to address likely soil contamination issues. One is a so-called “stock and cap” method Kasprisin said successfully has been used along the West Coast.

As the name of the method implies, polluted soils are piled up, left on site and capped over.

Another suggestion has future development built over polluted soils using a “pit and platform” approach. Basically, buildings would be constructed on platforms, with parking underneath. Kasprisin said Bellingham has taken a very similar approach in dealing with contaminated areas in that city.

“There’s problems, but there’s hope,” Kasprisin said in terms of rebuilding the city’s lakefront, with most of that hope seemingly involving public/private partnerships. The students envisioned campus-like developments coming to Kenmore, possibly including presumably high-tech research facilities.

According to Kasprisin, with the city’s lakefront, the local access to transportation routes and other factors, such a development is not impossible.

“That still could happen,” he said.

Stein noted that she enjoyed taking part in the study and feels that Kenmore is growing, with City Hall and its future new library standing out alongside its parks and Burke Gilman Trail.

“It was challenging,” she said of the study, adding it was a bonus that “I was pretty familiar with the site and the surrounding area.”