Following the installation of a new roof earlier this year at the old Yard Birds Shopping Mall in Chehalis, the building now has a new coat of olive-green paint as ongoing building restoration efforts continue.
And a bit of painting still remains to be done.
The restoration efforts are being carried out by Douglas LeMay in partnership with the Seattle-based law firm Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson under PISTON LLC, which purchased the Yard Birds property in July of 2024.
Restoration is being carried out slowly, though, as LeMay is still actively looking for interested business tenants to rent the property, he stated in a phone call with The Chronicle on Thursday, Oct. 23.
“We got a lot to do still, but it’s dry inside,” LeMay said.
He added they are currently holding off on doing some renovations inside, as depending on who the new tenant ends up being, they might want to reconfigure the inside of the old mall to match their business needs.
Given the building’s size — 305,000 square feet — it could easily host a variety of different businesses, but only time will tell what ultimately becomes of the former Yard Birds shopping mall.
A Lewis County landmark, Yard Birds was originally the idea of childhood friends Bill Jones and Rich Gillingham, who started a military surplus store in Centralia in 1947 called Two Yard Birds Surplus with two “sad sack” bird characters as store mascots.
By 1948, they had hired Dick Baker and expanded and moved the store north of the Chehalis city limits as they claimed it had become the largest surplus store on the West Coast.
A decade later, the building was expanded to 110,000 square feet and featured 16 separate departments with five additional businesses leasing space inside.
Eventually, Yard Birds outgrew the space and moved to its current building between Kresky and National avenues in 1971. It boasted sales of everything from automotive parts and tools to housewares, furniture and clothing.
A 60-foot steel and fiberglass Yard Bird statue was also erected outside of the mall both as a tourist attraction and to let those driving on Interstate 5 know where Yard Birds was, but it burned down in 1976 after Wayne Honeycut’s car caught fire underneath it.
Other Yard Birds malls were opened in Olympia and Shelton, but both closed by 1995.
In 1998, Yard Birds was purchased by Darris McDaniel who had opened a Shop’n Kart location in the mall in 1990 and hoped “to turn it into the Yard Birds of old,” as previously reported by The Chronicle.
The rise of online shopping over the next decade saw the death of many big box retailers along with retail shopping malls such as Yard Birds — a problem that worsened in 2008 with the recession.
McDaniel’s troubles were further exacerbated by multiple flooding events which damaged the building and property. In 2017, the Shop’n Kart inside Yard Birds was closed.
The Yard Birds building has been permanently closed since August 2022 after the building failed a Washington state Labor & Industries inspection and mounting unpaid utility bills led to the power in the building being cut — upending many small businesses that were leasing space inside at the time.
After nearly two years of looking for a buyer, the property was finally sold to LeMay and PISTON LLC for $2.4 million in July 2024.
For a full history of Yard Birds and more information about the old shopping mall, visit https://www.yardbirdshistory.com/timeline/.
