One Vacant Lot on Fifth Street Is Still Shaping How Valley Junction Feels This Summer

Thursday nights in Valley Junction are loud again. The farmers market fills the 100 through 300 blocks of Fifth Street from 4 to 8 p.m., more than 80 vendors deep, with live music running out of the beverage garden in Railroad Park. Walk a little further and you'll find Bix & Co. at 111 Fifth Street doing exactly what it was built to do: forty-two TVs, a table hard to get on game night, cracker-thin pizzas and pork tenderloins built around Iowa suppliers like South Union Bakery and Graziano Bros.

Then you hit 122 Fifth Street and the block just stops. No business has operated there in four years, first as a shuttered bar, then as an empty lot.

That gap isn't a sign the neighborhood's comeback lost steam. It's closer to the opposite. Almost everything around that one address has already reopened, been rebuilt, or changed hands. The lot that hasn't moved is the exception, not the pattern, and understanding why it's the exception tells you something true about how historic Main Street districts actually get rebuilt: one property at a time, on one owner's timeline, with no single finish line for the whole street.

Sixteen Years, One Closure, Two Years Empty

The Longest Yard closed on July 10, 2022, after 16 years pouring yards and half-yards of beer to a sports-bar crowd. The building itself dated to 1894. By the time the bar shut its doors, the structure had been deferred on for years, and it showed. Three separate structural evaluations, including one the city itself commissioned, came back worse each time. West Des Moines' community and economic development director, Ryan Moffatt, said the city pushed hard to save it, but in a building that old with that much deferred maintenance, rehab stopped being realistic. Demolition began around August 12, 2024, roughly two years after the bar's last call.

That two-year gap between closing and demolition is the part residents actually lived through: a boarded storefront on a street the city and the Historic Valley Junction Foundation were otherwise actively promoting as a destination. The Foundation and neighboring merchants had started calling it an eyesore by the time crews finally arrived.

What Actually Filled Back In

While that one lot sat empty, most of the rest of Fifth Street kept moving. Here's what the current picture looks like if you're deciding where to grab dinner this week.

The building at 304 Fifth Street is its own small story. It's built from mass timber, unusual enough construction for the district that it drew attention on its own. Restaurateur Ryan Cooper, who already runs Cooper's on 5th and Winchester Public House a few doors down, signed on for the street-level space alongside chef Cass Spence's DSM Culinary, which teaches public cooking classes and had spent three years hunting for a permanent home before landing there. Cooper described the building itself as the draw, saying he wanted the space partly just so no one else could take it. His restaurant was still unnamed as of the most recent public reporting, with a self-described "slight Italian vibe" to the concept. DSM Culinary, meanwhile, shows up today at that exact Suite 2 address in the Foundation's own current business directory, meaning that half of the building is confirmed running.

Why the Corner at 122 Is Taking Longer

The Longest Yard site isn't just waiting on a contractor. It's the product of a specific deal that only came together after the old building came down. Forest Avenue Properties LLC bought the lot in February 2024 for $550,000, according to Polk County Assessor's Office records, from Commonwealth Properties LLC. Developer Tom Baldwin, who grew up a few blocks from Valley Junction, later worked out a development agreement with the city to put up a new two-story building with a restaurant and bar concept on both floors, operated under his Dark Side of the Spoon hospitality group. The city backed the project with a 10-year, 100 percent tax increment financing package, plus support from its Property Improvement Fund and Regulatory Compliance Fund.

"A good outcome to an unfortunate situation."

That's how Moffatt described the deal once it came together, a tidy summary of a process that took a demolition, a $550,000 land sale, and a decade-long tax incentive to reach. As of that reporting in May 2025, Baldwin was still lining up financing and hoped to break ground soon with an opening targeted for early 2026. That target has already come and gone this year without the address showing up in the Foundation's current list of open Fifth Street businesses, which is the kind of thing you notice if you've been checking for a reopening date and not finding one.

Part of what's slowing any new construction on Fifth Street, not just this lot, is that the district isn't building under ordinary rules. Valley Junction has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2017, and West Des Moines has adopted newer design standards for the corridor developed with land-use consultant Tesca. Those standards still allow three-story buildings and apartments, but they steer new construction toward traditional facades instead of glass-and-steel modern styling. Whatever eventually opens at 122 Fifth Street will likely look older than it is, by design, which is worth knowing if you drive past expecting something that reads as brand new.

The Rest of the Block Isn't Standing Still Either

Fifth Street's other visible changes this year are smaller and less photogenic, but residents notice them. The city's ongoing Fifth Street streetscape project has moved into a second phase covering the cross streets at Maple and Elm along with sections of the public parking lots, and that work has meant removing some of the district's mature trees. The replacements are smaller-growing species chosen to actually fit the tree boxes over time, rather than outgrowing them the way the originals eventually did.

At Railroad Park, the new public restrooms that were supposed to accompany the farmers market renovation had been delayed for months waiting on the correct roofing materials. They're finally close to finished. It's a small thing, but if you've been to a Thursday market recently and wondered why there was a fenced-off structure near the beverage garden, that's what it was.

What This Means for Your Thursday Nights

None of this changes how the market itself runs. The 2026 season opened Thursday, May 7, and continues weekly through September from 4 to 8 p.m., with Fifth Street closed between the 100 and 300 blocks to make room for vendors.

A few things worth knowing if you're headed down this summer:

• More than 80 vendors set up weekly, selling produce, baked goods, plants, and prepared food
• Live music runs in the beverage garden at Railroad Park most weeks
• Bike parking near the beverage garden has been expanded this season
• Parking behind the Fifth Street businesses on both sides of the street is available after 2 p.m., when the marked street spots close for setup
• DART Route 4 Crosstown stops near Fifth and the market if you'd rather skip parking altogether

The market, Bix & Co.'s crowded TVs, Cooper's, and DSM Culinary are all evidence that most of Fifth Street rebuilt itself faster than the one corner everyone keeps checking on. A single stalled property can make an entire block feel unfinished even when it's carrying almost none of the actual redevelopment weight. Once you know that the empty lot at 122 Fifth Street is running on its own financing timeline and its own historic design review, separate from everything that already reopened around it, the block stops feeling stuck and starts looking like what it actually is: mostly done, with one more piece still working through the process that took every other piece on the street a year or two to clear.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood block by block instead of skimming it in passing, that's exactly the kind of local read Christopher Lewis likes to talk through, whether or not real estate is anywhere on your mind this summer. Let's Connect.