Perry Street between 9th and 12th Avenue filled with more than 150 vendor booths, three stages of music, a petting zoo, and a beer garden for the 24th annual South Perry Street Fair. If you've lived on the South Hill long enough to have a favorite spot along the route, the change in timing may surprise you. The Street Fair has run on the third Saturday of July since 1999. This year it didn't happen in July at all.
That's the first habit South Hill gave up this year. It's not the only one. A four-lane boulevard that's carried traffic the same way for decades is about to lose a lane. A storefront on Regal Street that sat through one failed tenant and years of searching finally has a business in it that's sticking. None of these are dramatic on their own. Put together, they say something about how this neighborhood is adjusting to demands it's been absorbing quietly for a while: more heat in the summer calendar, more conflict on a road built for a different traffic pattern, more pressure on retail space that used to sit empty longer than anyone planned.
The Fair Moved from July to September
South Perry Together, the nonprofit that runs the fair, made the call earlier this year to move the 2026 event from its usual midsummer date to September, citing the increasingly punishing heat of a South Hill July. Vendors who'd spent decades setting up canopies in July's full sun told organizers the later date has been a relief. The fair kept everything else that makes it the fair: Saturday's lineup ran from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., with more than 130 artisan and craft booths in the run-up estimate and a final vendor count that grew past that once the day arrived, plus twenty bands rotating through three stages.
What's new is the addition of something South Perry hadn't tried in 24 years of doing this. In a 92.9 ZZU report before the event, Lily Booth, board president of South Perry Together, described it:
"For the first time, we are offering historic walking tours of South Perry. We have a local historian who lives in the neighborhood and has helped us make some initializations in the neighborhood."
A neighborhood tradition changing its date because the old date no longer matches the climate it was built around, then using the occasion to formalize its own history with a walking tour, isn't a small adjustment. The move leaves the fair's familiar Saturday format intact. Organizers are already talking about next year's 25th anniversary, and there's no indication July is coming back.
Grand Boulevard Is About to Lose a Lane
The Spokesman-Review reported on a different kind of adjustment a few blocks away. Grand Boulevard between 14th and 29th Avenue carries at least 14,000 vehicles a day, making it one of South Hill's busiest corridors, and it's currently an undivided street with two lanes running in each direction and no center turn lane. That design means anyone turning left has to sit in a live travel lane waiting for a gap, which is exactly the kind of setup that produces rear-end collisions and forces following traffic to swerve around stopped cars.
City engineers pulled the numbers: 42 reported crashes along that stretch between 2020 and 2024, with eight of them estimated as preventable if a separated turn lane had existed. In February, the Spokane Transportation Commission voted unanimously to send a plan to City Hall that would convert Grand Boulevard to one lane in each direction with a center turn lane, along with pedestrian upgrades including a flashing crosswalk beacon at 27th Avenue and roughly four new median islands at intersections still being finalized. The tradeoff is real and city engineers said so directly: the change is projected to cut crashes on the corridor by as much as 24%, but it will also add somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds of travel time during peak hours, depending on direction.
Not everyone thinks the plan goes far enough. Sarah Rose, co-director of the transportation safety group Spokane Reimagined, argued for narrower vehicle lanes freeing up space for protected bike lanes on either side, something the current proposal doesn't include. City engineer Brian Brisendine pointed to the city's 11-foot minimum lane width and a request from Spokane Transit Authority for lanes wide enough to accommodate its buses as the reason the design landed where it did. The debate is still live, but the direction is settled: Grand Boulevard, built decades ago for a traffic pattern that no longer matches how the street actually gets used by drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians all trying to share it, is being resized around what it's carrying now instead of what it was drawn for.
Regal Street's Longest Vacancy Finally Ended
The third change took three years to happen, according to the man who made it happen. Jason Crippen had been looking for a Spokane location for his brother's Missoula restaurant concept, the Breakfast Club, since before the pandemic ended. According to the Spokesman-Review, he'd already run one restaurant on this side of the state, the Staggering Ox in Spokane Valley, from 2003 to 2013, so he knew the market. What he didn't have was a spot, until the old Ezell's Chicken space at 4919 S. Regal went empty.
In the Spokesman-Review report, Crippen said, "We've been looking for probably three years for a location."
The Breakfast Club opened quietly in January and held its official grand opening on February 28. The concept, launched by Jason's twin brother Justin in Missoula in 2015 and since expanded to Helena, leans into an eighties diner aesthetic and a menu of breakfast burritos named after characters from the 1985 movie the restaurant is named for. The one people keep ordering is the grilled steak burrito, built around prime rib marinated for days. By midsummer, a Spokesman-Review feature found a restaurant with a steady run of regulars.
A twenty-five seat diner with a takeout-heavy business model isn't a dramatic story by itself. What makes it worth noting is how long that particular storefront sat unclaimed. Regal Street's retail strip has quietly filled in other gaps too, including a Vietnamese coffee shop that opened recently near 57th and Regal, but the Breakfast Club's three-year search is the clearest evidence that this stretch of the South Hill has more demand for small, owner-operated food businesses than the pace of storefront turnover has kept up with.
What Connects a Fair, a Road, and a Diner
None of these three changes were coordinated. The fair moved because of heat. The boulevard is changing because of crash data. The diner opened because a family spent three years looking for the right spot and found it. But each one points at the same underlying fact: South Hill in 2026 is being used differently than the calendar, the road design, and the commercial vacancy rate assumed it would be. A festival that ran in July for a quarter century finally bent to the actual climate. A four-lane street built for a traffic pattern from decades ago is being resized for the turning movements, foot traffic, and bus routes it carries now. A storefront that outlasted one tenant and sat empty long enough for a family to spend three years circling back to it finally found someone willing to commit.
None of this rewrites the character of the neighborhood. Grand Boulevard will still run past the same houses. The Street Fair will still close down Perry Street with vendors and music, just not in July anymore. The Breakfast Club will still be slinging burritos named after movie characters most of its morning regulars have seen a dozen times. What's changed is smaller and more interesting than a reinvention: three fixtures of South Hill life adjusted, in the same year, to fit how the neighborhood actually runs.
If you're watching any of these changes play out on your own street, from the new crosswalk timing on Grand to whichever storefront fills next on Regal, Monique Thielman would be glad to talk through what it means for South Hill and the rest of Spokane's neighborhoods.
