Drive down Perry Street this month and you'll pass a fenced half acre at Newark and Denver where a church used to stand, a farmers market setting up folding tables three blocks south, and a bakery with a line out the door that's been there since 2018. Someone seeing all three for the first time might read it as a neighborhood tipping into something new. Someone who's lived here since before The Grain Shed existed will tell you it's the opposite. South Perry isn't becoming anything. It's finishing a plan the city and a handful of business owners started nearly twenty years ago, and the construction fencing is just the last visible piece of it.
That distinction matters if you actually live in this stretch of Spokane's lower South Hill, because it changes what the next twelve months are going to feel like on the ground.
The Welding Shop That Became a Coffee Shop
The story people tell about South Perry usually starts in 1999, but the real starting point is five years earlier. In 1994, Mark Camp rented a former mechanic shop on Perry Street to have space for welding. It wasn't until 1999 that he turned the space into something else entirely: a coffee shop called The Shop. At the time it looked like an odd bet on a strip that had a reputation for the opposite of foot traffic.
The bet needed help to pay off, and it got it in 2007, when the city of Spokane put streetscape money into Perry Street as the first project under its Centers and Corridors pilot program, more than $900,000 in improvements funded mostly through federal and state dollars along with contributions from Spokane Transit Authority. Pat Kautzman, whose wife Sue owns South Perry Pizza, credits Camp with laying the groundwork and being instrumental in getting that streetscape work done. When South Perry Pizza opened in 2009, becoming the first neighborhood spot open for dinner and evening hours, Kautzman called it a tipping point for the community. By the end of that same year, at least six new businesses had opened along the strip, and the storefronts between 8th and 12th Avenues that had struggled for decades started functioning like a district instead of a scattering of vacant buildings.
That's the piece worth holding onto: South Perry's comeback was never organic in the sense of just happening. It was one guy's coffee shop, one city infrastructure investment, and one restaurant opening that made staying open past 5pm worth the risk.
The Strip As It Actually Runs Today
Walk Perry Street between 8th and 12th today and here's roughly what's still standing from that original wave, plus what's grown up around it:
- The Shop, Camp's original coffee shop, still pouring Anvil Coffee Roasters and known for cinnamon rolls big enough to split
- South Perry Pizza, the 2009 opening the Kautzmans still run
- The Lantern Tap House, which started as The Lantern Tavern under Jeff Nordvall and Laura Paisley, who moved to the neighborhood from Seattle to open it
- Perry Street Brewing, opened by Missoula transplant Ben Lukes as a family-friendly gathering spot
- Bike Hub, the cycling shop Josh Tofsrud and his partners opened in 2009 to serve South Hill riders
- Bee You Organics, which started as an Etsy shop in 2017 before opening a brick and mortar storefront in 2019
- Liberty Park Florist and Greenhouse, one of the oldest businesses in the district, still filling a glass building with plants north of Grain Shed
- Casper Fry, tucked into the north half of the old Altamont Pharmacy building
None of these are new discoveries. They're the accumulated result of a nearly two-decade build, and most of them predate the current wave of attention by a decade or more.
Grain Shed Already Left, and That's the Point
If there's one business that gets pointed to as proof South Perry has arrived, it's The Grain Shed, the worker and farmer owned cooperative that opened in June 2018 at 1026 East Newark, on the corner of Laura. Baker Shaun Thompson Duffy and brewers Joel Williamson and Teddy Benson built the place around landrace and heritage grain varieties grown at Palouse Heritage, a farm about an hour southwest of Spokane in Whitman County, and roughly 98 percent of what goes into their bread and beer is sourced within 150 miles of the city. The bakery still runs on a wood fired oven the staff nicknamed Eleanor, and the bread menu still leans on Old World styles like dinkelbrot and vollkornbrot alongside sandwiches and Monday pizza.
Here's the part that actually tells you something about the neighborhood's trajectory: The Grain Shed didn't stay contained to South Perry once it succeeded. The co-op opened a downtown taproom in October 2022, and that same year announced plans to expand into Hillyard and to build a full scale restaurant, wholesale bakeshop, and milling operation at Liberty Lake. A neighborhood that was still trying to prove itself wouldn't produce a business confident enough to export its own model elsewhere. South Perry's flagship brand growing beyond South Perry isn't a sign the district lost its anchor. It's a sign the anchor worked well enough to replicate.
What's Actually Going Up Near Grant Park
The half acre lot at Newark and Denver that's been fenced off for the better part of this year used to hold Southside Church of Christ, a small white building with a peaked roof, along with two adjoining lots that had a habit of collecting illegal dumping under a stand of ponderosa pines. Spokane based real estate investment firm NARP LLC bought and combined the three parcels in December 2024, demolished the church building in 2025, and filed permits for a four story, 40 unit building called Perry Street Apartments, a $5 million project spanning roughly 39,000 square feet with a 43 stall parking lot and an on-site gym. Spokane Journal of Business reporting on the permit filing put construction start at summer 2026, meaning if the timeline holds, framing should already be underway or close to it by the time this posts. T.W. Clark Construction is the general contractor, Pondera Architecture designed it, and the site sits close enough to Grant Elementary School and the South Perry retail strip that the developer's own environmental filing expects the new residents to become customers of the businesses already there.
It's the first major new housing built in the core of the district in years, which is exactly why it reads to some passersby as a sign of sudden change rather than what it is: a builder betting that the district's twenty year old foot traffic pattern is durable enough to fill 40 units.
The Grant Finishing the Job the Streetscape Started
The other piece of construction context worth knowing is administrative rather than visible from the street, but it explains why South Perry keeps getting singled out alongside Garland, Hillyard, and North Monroe in city planning documents. The Washington Trust for Historic Preservation is managing a $2.5 million grant, funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, to support ongoing revitalization across those four historic Spokane business districts. Smaller activation grants funded 27 projects for local businesses and nonprofits between late spring and late summer 2025, and the larger infrastructure work in each district is slated to wrap by the end of November 2026.
Read against the 2007 streetscape project, this is the same playbook running a second time, just with federal pandemic recovery money instead of a Centers and Corridors pilot budget. The first round bought South Perry sidewalks good enough to make outdoor seating and evening foot traffic viable. This round is closing out whatever the first round didn't finish, on a deadline three months from now.
The Market Keeps Running Through All of It
None of this changes what a Thursday afternoon on Perry Street actually looks like right now. The Perry Street Thursday Market still runs 3 to 7pm from May through October, and the same string of vendors, live music, and neighbors catching up over produce continues whether or not there's a crane visible three blocks over. That's worth sitting with as the season turns toward fall: the construction fencing and the grant paperwork are real, but they're happening at the edges of a district whose center, the actual stretch of sidewalk between The Shop and Grain Shed, has been running the same rhythm since roughly 2010.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's actually changing in the neighborhoods around Spokane and North Idaho, rather than what a listing photo implies, that's a useful habit to keep. Robert Jacobs II & Associates spends the same kind of attention on Coeur d'Alene, Hayden, and the rest of North Idaho's lake communities, and you can browse how that plays out across the region on the Spokane neighborhood page. No pitch here beyond that. Just worth knowing who's paying attention when the fencing finally comes down.
