Lewiston Center Spent Two Years Proving Itself Before It Reopened

Drive past 1810 19th Avenue this month and you will notice the building has dropped a word. It used to be Lewiston Mall. Now the sign just says Lewiston Center, and the difference is not cosmetic. The property spent the better part of three years testing every new addition before committing to it, and the newest tenant took longer to earn its spot than almost anyone driving by would guess.

That tenant is SmasHouse Burgers & Tacos, and its path into the building is the whole story of what happened to this stretch of Lewiston retail.

A Burger Joint That Waited Two Years for a Lease

Richard Lang started SmasHouse as a food truck on Main Street in September 2024. He didn't move it indoors right away. From August through November of 2025, SmasHouse ran a trial in the Lewiston Center parking lot, a deliberate test to see whether the demand that had been building on Main Street would follow the brand to a mall lot on 19th Avenue. It did. The restaurant then closed for renovations and reopened this past January in the space that used to hold A&W and Orange Julius, inside the section of the building that still gets foot traffic on a cold Idaho afternoon.

Two years from food truck to permanent lease is a long runway for a burger restaurant. It is also, according to the property's own management, exactly the model the building is now built around.

The Man Who Renamed the Mall Also Runs the GNC

Lewiston Center changed hands almost three years ago, and the new ownership brought in Hobby Lobby, Planet Fitness, and Seidel Music & Repair as anchor-level additions. Older tenants stayed put through the transition, including Bath & Body Works, Pro Image Sports, Harry Ritchie's, and Great Clips.

The person managing the property's new direction is Billy Jeffrey Scharnhorst, who has run the mall's General Nutrition Center location for decades. He is not an outside developer parachuting in with a redevelopment plan. He is a tenant who has watched this building's traffic patterns for years and is now making the calls for the whole property.

"We're on a new direction," Scharnhorst told the Lewiston Tribune in January. "So a new direction means a new title. The Lewiston Center means eventually we will be the center of everything happening. That's what's happening right now is the comeback."

That framing matters because it is not describing a single grand reopening. It is describing an accumulation of small, tested bets, the same approach that let SmasHouse spend a season in a parking lot before anyone signed a lease.

The Real Product Is the Calendar

Scharnhorst brought back Hickory Farms for the Christmas season and started adding vendor fairs one at a time, watching what worked before adding the next one. The first was a Black Friday market. It did well enough that the property expanded to two vendor fairs in December, then added a Valentine's Day market, an Easter market, a Christmas in July market, and a fall market scheduled for October.

Nobody built that calendar in a single planning meeting. It grew one successful weekend at a time, which is the same logic that got a food truck from Main Street into a permanent storefront. Lewiston Center is not betting on one signature reopening moment. It is stacking small, proven events and letting the winners repeat.

What Else Is Already on the Fall Calendar

Lewiston Center's slow-build approach is happening at the same time the rest of downtown is running its usual fall lineup, and residents circling dates on a calendar this month have more than the mall to track.

The 92nd Annual Lewiston Roundup wrapped up earlier this month at the fairgrounds on Tammany Creek Road, and the next stretch of the season is already scheduled:

• The 15th annual Downtown Lewiston Artwalk runs October 2 and 3, showcasing area artists across downtown storefronts.
• Judy Fairley's work is on display at the Valley Art Center through the end of October.
• The Hometown T1D Fall Festival returns for its fourth year October 3 and 4 at the Nez Perce County Fair, with the usual pumpkins and a petting zoo.
• O'Connor Days runs the same weekend at the Jack O'Connor Hunting Heritage and Education Center.
• The HIITEM'WAQ'IISWIT "Dance for Life" Pow Wow is set for October 16 through 18.
• The Seaport Striders' Lewis-Clark Half Marathon, 5K, and kids' runs kick off at 9 a.m. on October 17.
• Lewiston Civic Theatre opens its next production, a murder-mystery set on an isolated estate, October 16 and runs it through November 1.
• The Nez Perce County Fairgrounds craft fair brings more than 80 exhibitors to Burrell Avenue for its usual fall run of handmade goods.

None of this is new in the sense of unprecedented. Most of these events have run for years, some for decades. What is worth noticing is that they are running on schedule at the same time a three-year-old commercial property is proving out an entirely different kind of calendar next door, one built on trial runs instead of tradition. Lewiston in October is both the town that has done the Roundup 92 times and the town where a burger truck spent two years earning a lease. Both things are true on the same nineteen blocks.

Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Live Here

The easy read on Lewiston Center is that a mall died and something replaced it. That is not what the record shows. What the record shows is a property that stopped trying to fill every space with one big signing and started letting tenants prove demand in cheaper, smaller formats first, a parking lot, a single Black Friday weekend, a food truck on Main Street, before it committed square footage to any of them. That is a slower way to fill a building. It also means the businesses that do end up with a lease have already survived a real test in front of Lewiston customers, not just a corporate site-selection spreadsheet.

If you have driven past 1810 19th Avenue and wondered whether the new sign meant much, the answer is that it describes a different way of doing business, one bet at a time, that just happens to be working.

Kiley Waldemarson keeps an eye on what's actually changing around the Lewis-Clark Valley, not just what gets a press release. If you want to talk about what a shift like this signals for a neighborhood, or you're just looking for a good excuse to grab a burger downtown, reach out to Kiley Waldemarson.