Howard Amon Park Finally Has a Front Door
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
For most of the past year, the building at 94 Lee Blvd sat dark. It sits right where Lee Boulevard feeds into Howard Amon Park, the kind of corner every regular walker, jogger, and festival-goer in Richland passes without thinking twice. Last October, the brewery that had run the space for three years announced it was closing and looking for someone to take over the lease. Then nothing happened. No new sign. No lights on in the evening. Just an empty storefront at the one entrance to the park that gets the most foot traffic in the entire city.
That changed in March. And the timing matters more than it looks, because this is also the year Howard Amon Park's signature weekend turns thirty.
The building has a specific history worth knowing if you live nearby. Moonshot Brewery ran the space for three years before closing last October and putting the lease back on the market. For roughly five months, the storefront that greets everyone walking into Howard Amon Park from Lee Boulevard had no tenant at all. If you were one of the people who walks the park loop most mornings, you probably watched that corner sit empty through the winter and into early spring, wondering what would eventually fill it.
What eventually filled it wasn't a new concept chasing the park's foot traffic. It was a restaurant that had already spent seven years building a following a few miles away.
The Endive Eatery had been a fixture in West Richland since 2019, known for a rotating seasonal menu of soups, salads, sandwiches, and bowls, plus a following loyal enough that its Google rating still sits above four stars. When the lease on its original Kennedy Road location came up for renewal, chef and owner Edward Shoemaker and his wife Claire made the call to close that spot and move the whole operation to 94 Lee Blvd, right at the park entrance. They announced the opening on social media on March 8, and the doors have stayed open since, now serving lunch and dinner with an expanded menu the owners describe as their "friterie" concept, alongside beer, wine, and seasonal cocktails.
Shoemaker isn't new to running more than one dining room. He also owns The Witlof, a Basque-Korean fusion restaurant in Walla Walla, a useful data point if you're wondering whether a seven-year-old West Richland cafe can hold up under a bigger, higher-traffic location. The track record suggests it can.
For a park that has spent the better part of a year without a real anchor at its main entrance, that is a meaningful shift. It's the difference between telling out-of-town guests "there's usually a food truck or two" and telling them "grab a table at the restaurant right at the entrance, then walk the loop."
Richland residents don't need to wait until Labor Day to see the park in full use this year. Two community events, two weeks apart, are both landing at Howard Amon Park this late summer:
That's two major draws to the same stretch of riverfront inside a three-week window, on top of whatever regular foot traffic the park already sees from walkers, cyclists, and people just cutting through on their way downtown. A park that used to have one obvious food option nearby, and often didn't even have that, is now hosting back-to-back weekends worth planning around.
Tumbleweed isn't new to Richland. It's presented by the Three Rivers Folklife Society, a small nonprofit that has run the festival entirely with volunteers for three decades, and this year's 30th-anniversary theme, "Thirty Years by the River," shapes both the festival's Sunday theme concert and its Jane Titland Memorial Songwriting Contest.
The festival's structure is worth understanding before you show up, because it isn't uniformly free. Friday evening's higher-energy acoustic lineup is free to attend. Saturday's benefit concert runs $15 for adults and $12 for seniors and teens, with children twelve and under admitted free, and the benefit Contra Dance carries a separate $10 admission. Everything else across the weekend, more than 100 performances on multiple outdoor stages plus an indoor dance floor and over twenty workshops in styles from bluegrass to sea chanteys, is free. Craft and food vendors are on-site throughout, which means the festival itself has never really left people without something to eat. What it hasn't had, until this year, is a sit-down option right at the park's edge for the days before and after the music stops.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only think about Tumbleweed as a once-a-year event. The festival has run for thirty years regardless of who occupied that corner building. What's actually new is that the corner itself has stopped changing hands. For years, that storefront cycled through different concepts and, for a stretch last winter, no concept at all. Now, heading into a milestone anniversary weekend, the park has a restaurant with a seven-year track record sitting right at its entrance, open for regular lunch and dinner service rather than just festival concessions.
That's a small thing on paper. In practice, it changes how a resident actually uses the park. It means you can walk the riverfront loop on a random Tuesday and grab dinner without driving somewhere else first. It means the two weeks between National Night Out and Tumbleweed aren't just a gap on the calendar, they're a stretch where the park has a reliable reason to stop by even without an event happening. Thirty years of Tumbleweed proves the festival isn't going anywhere. A restaurant finally settling in at the entrance suggests the park itself might be turning into more than a once-a-summer destination.
If you've lived near Howard Amon Park for a while, you already know how much the neighborhood shifts once the corner buildings stop turning over. This is one of those shifts worth noticing while it's still recent.
And if all this talk of the park's evolving corner has you curious about what else has changed in your own Richland neighborhood, including what your home might be worth in today's market, Caroline Couture Homes offers a free home valuation any time you're ready to look.
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