Work on a new roof for the old Yard Birds shopping mall in Chehalis is nearly complete thanks to ongoing building restoration efforts being undertaken by Douglas LeMay in partnership with the Seattle-based law firm Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson under the PISTON LLC.
The LLC purchased the Yard Birds property in July 2024, and while many in the area speculated the mall would be torn down so the land could be repurposed, LeMay told The Chronicle he wasn’t leaning that way.
He also said he expected the restoration process to take at least two years. Some ideas being floated for the Yard Birds property include car-related activities or dealerships, storage, modular homes, a movie theater and drive-in, a community center or warehousing.
“We still don’t know what we’re gonna do with it, but we’re still working on it,” LeMay said in a Wednesday, April 16, phone call with The Chronicle. “The roof, it’s like 95% done, I think.”
He added they are working on repairing the parking lot and adding stormwater retention ponds, along with tackling the building’s electrical issues.
While he still anticipated restoration efforts to take around two years total, he also said “I think we’ll probably be a little ahead of that.”
Given the building’s size — 305,000 square feet — he said it could easily host more than one of the suggestions being considered, but only time will tell what ultimately becomes of the former Yard Birds shopping mall.
As for the large, iconic Yard Birds statue on the west side of the property, its fate is still undecided.
Over the past year, LeMay contacted Lewis County Historical Museum Executive Director Jason Mattson about possible preservation efforts for the old statue. However, the mall’s restoration is still LeMay’s priority.
A Lewis County landmark, Yard Birds was originally the idea of childhood friends Bill Jones and Rich Gillingham, who started a military surplus story 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 — up-ending many small businesses which were leasing space inside at the time.
After nearly two years of looking for a buyer, the property was finally sold to LeMay 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/.
