The railway that used to run above the station is a footpath now. When the Odakyū line went underground, the strip of land it left behind became a long, thin promenade, and the two halves of Shimokitazawa, north and south, separated for decades by the tracks, were joined together. The shopping association covers about 670 metres in all, with the main street in front of the north exit accounting for roughly 180 of them, and some two hundred member shops arranged along that length.

Vintage clothing shops, small theatres, live music venues and coffee shops are packed into lanes too narrow for cars, close enough together that reading the signs slows you to a stop. A great deal of the stock is homeware, antiques and second-hand goods, which is not an accident of local taste: those are the trades that can survive in a small unit, so the width of the lanes has effectively chosen the businesses. Housing here runs to small single-occupancy flats, and people who want to open a shop keep arriving, so the line-up on any given street turns over within a few years.

Widening the town by burying the railway did not empty the narrow lanes, which is the outcome nobody quite predicted. Given a wide street and a narrow one running the same way, most people take the narrow one. An open view is worth less than not knowing what is around the next corner, and Shimokitazawa happens to own that uncertainty as a matter of layout rather than of policy. It is a district you navigate by curiosity, and the promenade has simply given it one more edge to spill from.