Greg Mott has owned Corner Door Fountain and Books for 34 years. This summer, when the city tore up Argonne Road outside his door, he watched customers who normally turned off Trent Avenue simply stop turning. "It is disappointing to not have the customers feeling that they're able to come this direction," he told a Spokane television station in September, "or that they have to avoid the area." The pavement is fixed now. The habit isn't.
That gap is the real story in Millwood this fall. The Argonne Road Rehabilitation Project, the road construction that dominated two summers of daily life in this small city on the Spokane River, wrapped up its current phase in mid-September, about a month ahead of the city's own schedule. Lanes reopened, the detour signs came down, and by most measures the corridor is back to normal. But a repaved street and a recovered business district run on different clocks, and Millwood is currently sitting in the space between them, with the Millwood Farmers Market counting down its last few Wednesdays and a second round of construction already scheduled for early next year.
Why One Road Carries This Much Weight
Argonne Road is not just Millwood's main street. It is the only place cars can cross the Spokane River between Greene Street in Spokane, five miles to the west, and Trent Avenue, three miles to the east. The Washington State Transportation Improvement Board lists average daily traffic on this stretch at more than 30,000 vehicles, with heavy congestion at peak hours even in a normal year. Close a lane here and there is no detour route that doesn't add real distance to somebody's commute.
That's what made this summer's closures land so hard. The rehabilitation project started Monday, July 6, rebuilding the road surface between Trent Avenue and the Union Pacific Railroad, upgrading pedestrian ramps to current ADA standards, and adding a new pedestrian hybrid beacon at the Buckeye Avenue crossing. Traffic dropped to one lane in each direction for the length of the work zone, and left turns were prohibited anywhere inside the construction area for the entire project, a restriction the city defended bluntly: with only one lane running each way, a stalled left turn creates the kind of backup that turns a five-minute drive into something much longer.
The Timeline, Compressed
By early August the project moved into what the city called Phase 3 traffic control, shifting drivers onto the newly paved northbound lanes while crews demolished the old curb and sidewalk on the southbound side to prepare for cement treated base work. City updates specifically noted that businesses on the west side of Argonne would stay reachable from side streets or the open southbound lane, an acknowledgment that the construction zone and the shopping district were, for a few months, the same stretch of pavement.
| Milestone | Date | What Happened |
|---|---|---|
| Construction begins | July 6, 2026 | Single lane each direction, Trent Ave. to Union Pacific Railroad |
| Phase 3 traffic shift | Week of August 7, 2026 | Traffic moved to new northbound lanes; southbound curb work began |
| Full reopening | Week of September 14, 2026 | All lanes open, about a month ahead of schedule |
| Crosswalk signal + crack repair | February or March 2027 | New signal at Argonne and Buckeye; pavement crack repairs, several weeks |
| Phase 3 of the larger project | Delayed, per Mayor Beese | No new timeline announced |
The city's decision to finish early is genuinely good news, and it's worth saying plainly: getting ahead of a construction schedule on a road this heavily used is not the norm. But "ahead of schedule" describes the asphalt, not the customer who's spent two summers routing around this block out of habit.
What Reopening Doesn't Fix by Itself
Mott's frustration wasn't really about the construction itself. Millwood officials called the rehabilitation necessary and overdue, and nobody disputes that a road carrying 30,000 vehicles a day needed the work. His frustration was about the lag between when the barriers come down and when a regular customer remembers that the barriers are gone. A driver who spent a summer avoiding Argonne doesn't necessarily notice the week it reopens. They notice, eventually, and drift back, but that drift takes longer than the construction did.
This is the second summer in a row that stretch of Argonne has been under some form of construction, part of a multi-phase project that began in 2025. For a small business on that corridor, that means the disruption wasn't a single bad season. It was two, back to back, with the recovery window for the first one barely closing before the second one opened.
Three Wednesdays Left on Marguerite
The Millwood Farmers Market runs its 2026 season from May 27 through October 14, Wednesdays from 3 to 7 p.m., set up at Millwood Community Presbyterian Church at 3223 N. Marguerite Avenue, two blocks off Argonne on the west side of the road, the same side the city was actively repaving through August. As of this week, that leaves three market dates on the calendar: September 30, October 7, and October 14.
The timing is worth noticing on its own terms. The market spent its middle stretch operating a short walk from an active construction zone, on the same side of the road where northbound drivers were being rerouted through side streets to reach local businesses. Now that the road is clear, the market has less than a month left before it closes for the season, which means the corridor's brief window of full, unobstructed access and a still-running weekly draw only overlaps for these final few Wednesdays.
Who's Building While the Dust Settles
Millwood's food and retail mix survived the construction season largely intact. Old Mill Bar & Grill has kept its regular seven-day schedule through the work zone. Top of India, on the Sprague corridor near the historic district, and Golden Dragon Restaurant have stayed open as well. None of that is dramatic, but it matters: the businesses that depend on Argonne traffic didn't close, they just did fewer numbers for a while, which is exactly Mott's complaint in miniature.
The more interesting signal is what's coming next. Kindler's, a fast-casual chain built around gluten-free and seed-oil-free food, opened its first Spokane Valley location in mid-September on East Sprague and has a second location currently under construction in the Millwood neighborhood, according to reporting in the Spokane Journal. The company's owner has said the goal is four locations running by the end of next year. A business investing in a build-out here, timed to open right after the road cleared rather than during the disruption, reads as a bet that the corridor's traffic will come back, not a hedge against it.
Millwood's identity as a place worth that bet isn't new. The Millwood Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the city has spent this same year working through a state-mandated Comprehensive Plan update that explicitly calls for preserving the historic district's character even as it makes room for denser housing along Trent Avenue and Argonne Road. The road construction and the zoning conversation are, in a sense, the same argument in two different offices: how much change this small, dense, river-bounded city can absorb without losing what makes Argonne worth driving to in the first place.
The Calendar Isn't Actually Clear
The temptation is to treat mid-September as the finish line. It isn't. Mayor Shawna Beese, who took office this year after Kevin Freeman's twelve years as mayor, has said the city will return to the Argonne and Buckeye intersection in February or March to install the new pedestrian crosswalk signal and repair cracks in the road surface, work expected to take several weeks. She's also confirmed that a third phase of the larger corridor project has been delayed by several years, with no new date announced.
None of that is a reason for alarm. It's a reason to read the current calm accurately. The road is open, the market has three Wednesdays left, and the businesses along Argonne are getting the traffic back one regular customer at a time. That's the actual state of Millwood this fall: not a project that's finished, but a project that's paused in a place convenient enough to enjoy while it lasts.
If you're watching Millwood for reasons that go beyond this fall's construction calendar, whether that's a historic property in the district, a corridor storefront, or simply how a small city this tightly bounded by a river and a rail line tends to hold its value, Stacey Leech has been tracking this corner of the Spokane Valley market long enough to tell you what's noise and what's signal. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.
