Richland's Uptown Is Getting a New Street. Its Oldest Tenant Just Expanded to Two Cities Anyway.

"Basically, we're captains of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory," Ryan Pierson joked not long after he and Mike Bishop took over the Spudnut Shop. It's the kind of line that only makes sense if you already know the place: the potato-flour donut counter that's anchored Richland's Uptown Shopping Center since 1950, run by one family for 75 years before two Richland High grads bought it in 2023. What's less obvious, unless you've been watching the city's construction schedule, is that Pierson and Bishop expanded that same shop into Kennewick and Pasco in the fall of 2024, right around the time Richland was quietly finalizing the biggest street redesign the Uptown corridor has seen in decades.

That timing is the story. Not because the two events caused each other, but because they didn't have to happen at the same pace to both be true. Richland's George Washington Way corridor is in the middle of a multi-year construction sequence that will eventually change how you drive, park, and walk through Uptown. Meanwhile the shop that's watched the loudest tenant churn in that same shopping center for 75 years just bet on itself, twice, without waiting for the dust to settle. If you live here and you've been wondering what's actually happening to your regular stops on George Washington Way, the honest answer is: less than you'd think, and later than the city first said.

The Project That Hasn't Actually Started Yet

Here's the part that gets lost in the alarm around "construction downtown." The big one, officially branded the Downtown Loop, will convert George Washington Way and Jadwin Avenue into a one-way couplet between Symons Street and the George Washington Way/Jadwin intersection, adding two-way bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and upgraded pedestrian crossings along the way. It carries a price tag of roughly $23.5 million and has been years in the planning.

When the city first announced it in mid-2025, construction was pegged for spring 2026. That timeline has since moved. As of an April 2026 update from the city, the design was about 90 percent complete, right-of-way acquisition with affected property owners was still underway, and the city expected to issue a construction bid in the fall of 2026, with actual construction now starting in the winter of 2026-27. City Manager Jon Amundson said the project would bring "lasting improvements to safety, mobility and economic development" to the downtown core, which is true, but it also means the one-way conversion that will reshape traffic past Uptown hasn't broken ground as of this summer. If you've been bracing for lane closures in front of the shopping center, you have more runway than the original announcement suggested.

What has already happened, and is mostly finished, is a separate project: the South George Washington Way Improvements Project near the Columbia Point Drive intersection, a few blocks south of Uptown. That one broke ground in September 2025 and has been closing turn lanes and center lanes intermittently through the spring and summer of 2026 for grinding, paving, and curb work as crews wrap it up. Public Works Director Carlo D'Alessandro has been clear that this intersection work and the Downtown Loop are connected in purpose but separate projects, with the intersection improvements laying groundwork for the bigger one to come. In practical terms, that means the traffic friction you may have already noticed near Columbia Point Drive this year is the smaller, nearly finished project. The one that will actually touch Uptown's frontage is still ahead of you.

The Detour You Should Already Know About

There's one closure that has nothing to do with construction and everything to do with produce. Every Friday through October, from 6:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., The Parkway between Jadwin Avenue and George Washington Way closes to traffic for the Farmers Market. Businesses along The Parkway stay open during the closure, so if your usual route to Uptown cuts through there on a Friday morning, plan the detour rather than the panic. It's a small, recurring detail, but it's the kind of thing that trips up anyone who hasn't lived here long enough to build it into their week.

The Shop That Outlasted Its Own Franchise

To understand why Spudnut Shop's growth matters as a data point, it helps to know how close the whole concept came to disappearing. Barlow Ghirardo and Jerry Bell opened the original Spudnut Shop in the Richland Wye in 1948, using a franchised recipe developed in Utah that swapped potato flour for wheat. The shop moved to the Uptown Shopping Center about a year and a half later and never left. The national Spudnut franchise peaked in the late 1960s as the largest doughnut franchise in the country, then collapsed by the end of the 1970s after a bad investment by its parent company. Pierson has said that where there were once close to 500 Spudnut Shops nationwide, fewer than 30 remain today. Richland's is the oldest one still standing.

Val Driver, Ghirardo's daughter, ran the shop for more than 50 years before deciding it was time to retire, not long after the business celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2023. Rather than sell to an outside buyer, she passed it to Bishop and Pierson, two Tri-Cities natives who'd grown up eating there and spent months working alongside her before the sale closed, learning the operation and letting longtime staff and regulars get comfortable with the new faces. The changes since have been modest by design: an expanded breakfast menu, a tightened lunch menu, Sunday hours for the first time, and shop merchandise customers had been asking for.

Why the Expansion Timing Actually Matters

None of that alone would be a real estate-relevant story. What makes it worth noting for anyone tracking Uptown's health is what happened next. In 2024, a year after taking over a business that had never operated outside Richland in 76 years, Bishop and Pierson opened two new Spudnut Shop locations, one in Kennewick's Edison Food Park development and one in Pasco on Court Street. The Kennewick shop debuted October 29, the Pasco location followed November 12. Demand at the original Richland shop had grown enough that it wasn't uncommon to sell out, and the new owners decided that was the moment to grow the brand rather than protect the original location by standing still.

That expansion happened while the city was still years out from breaking ground on the Downtown Loop, and while the more localized South George Washington Way project was still in the planning stages that would only start construction the following fall. In other words, the Uptown's most storied tenant didn't wait to see how construction would affect foot traffic before deciding to grow. It grew first. Whatever disruption reaches George Washington Way this winter, it's arriving at a shopping center whose anchor tenant just proved it can expand into two new cities without the original location skipping a beat.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If your daily or weekly routine runs through Uptown, the practical takeaway is straightforward. The disruptive part of the Downtown Loop, the actual one-way conversion with new bike lanes and reworked intersections, is realistically a winter 2026-27 event, not a right-now event, based on the city's most recent public timeline. The intersection work near Columbia Point Drive that's been closing lanes intermittently this year is a separate, smaller project that appears to be finishing up. And the Uptown itself, with Spudnut Shop still filling the same glass-front bakery case it has since 1950, alongside longtime neighbors like Woo's Teriyaki and Octopus Garden, isn't showing signs of retreat. If anything, the Uptown's oldest business just told you, with its own money, that it expects to still be there.

For now, the line at Spudnut Shop moves about as fast as it always has. The street outside it hasn't changed yet. Plan your Friday mornings around the Farmers Market, keep an eye on the city's updates as the Downtown Loop bid moves through this fall, and don't mistake a nearly finished intersection project for the bigger one still to come.

If you're weighing a move into Richland's Uptown-adjacent neighborhoods and want a read on how projects like this tend to affect day-to-day life and long-term value, Caroline Couture can walk you through what's actually changing versus what just looks that way from the road. Get a free home valuation and a straight answer about your corner of Richland.