Walk the Boulevard this fall and the pavement under your feet changes about halfway down the eastern leg. New asphalt, still black instead of gray, runs from the edge of the Payette County Fairgrounds down to East Maple Street. A few weeks ago this stretch was gravel shoulder and drainage ditch. Now it's a twelve-foot path with fresh white striping waiting on the crosswalks.
Keep walking toward Maple and Elm and the story changes again. There's a chain-link fence around an empty lot where a saloon and a hair salon used to stand. Nothing new has been poured there. Nothing is scheduled to be.
The Half Mile That Finally Connects
The stretch of new pavement is Phase 3 of the city's Horseshoe Park Pathway, a twelve-foot-wide segment running from Highway 30 to East Maple Street that ties the existing trail system directly into the Payette County Fairgrounds. New Plymouth's Public Works Superintendent, Beau Ziemer, gave the city council a status update in July confirming the segment was nearing completion just ahead of the 2026 Payette County Fair, which ran August 5 through 8 this year under the theme "Pioneer Days, Frontier Ways" for its 80th run.
The project cost is estimated at $500,000, and unlike the original 2016 build, this phase is fully funded through the federal Transportation Alternatives Program, routed through the Local Highway Technical Assistance Council. HMH Engineering out of Meridian is managing construction. As of the council's July update, what's left is punch-list work: painting crosswalks and striping, installing stop signs, correcting some pavement grading for stormwater drainage, and a joint walkthrough inspection with LHTAC officials before the city signs off.
What the 2016 Path Never Reached
New Plymouth's streets already form a shape the city itself has trademarked in spirit if not in law. The town calls itself the World's Largest Horseshoe, a nod to the way its Boulevard curves in a double horseshoe around 11 acres of parkland, bordered on the north end by the railroad and the river. It's the kind of detail residents already know cold, the same way they know the five original working water wheels along Southwest First Avenue or the Tuttle Blacksmith & Welding Shop, the oldest building still standing in town and still an operating business.
What a lot of people may not have tracked as closely is how long it's taken to actually pave a walkable route through that shape. The first phase of the Horseshoe Park Pathway went in back in 2016: a half-mile stretch starting at the Fairgrounds and running southwest along Southeast Boulevard to South Plymouth Avenue. That build cost about $185,000, with the Idaho Transportation Department covering roughly $167,000 and the city covering an $18,000 local match. The trickiest part of that original project was the crossing at Highway 30, where the park intersects the highway and engineers had to work in a pedestrian crossing signal with a push-button light.
Here's the comparison that actually matters if you've lived here through both builds:
| Phase 1-2 (2016) | Phase 3 (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Length | Half mile | Highway 30 to E. Maple St. |
| Cost | $185,000 | ~$500,000 |
| Funding | ITD ($167,000) + city match ($18,000) | Federal TAP funds via LHTAC (fully funded) |
| Engineer | Holladay Engineering | HMH Engineering |
A full decade passed between those two builds. City planning documents already reference a Phase 4, which would extend paving through the remaining sections of Horseshoe Park, though no start date has been announced.
Ten Benches, Ten Names
While the pathway construction wrapped up, the city also opened something smaller and more personal: a bench sponsorship program along the new route. The Horseshoe Park Bench Project calls for installing ten new benches along the pathway, and residents can sponsor one for a $1,000 donation, each with a personalized plaque. It's a small civic detail, but it's also a sign of how the city is treating this stretch of pavement less like a transportation project and more like a piece of shared park space that people will actually sit in, not just walk through.
The Corner the Path Walks Past
The new pathway's southern end runs close enough to Maple and Elm that anyone using it this fall will pass within sight of the lot where the Double Diamond Saloon and Shear Attitude Salon used to stand.
The fire started around 8 a.m. on November 24, 2025, in the building on North Plymouth Avenue that housed the saloon, the salon, and a flower shop. New Plymouth Fire Chief Joseph Wyatt later described finding heavy smoke on what crews call the "Alpha Bravo side," the front-left corner of the building, and said the fire had already extended through other parts of the structure by the time crews made entry. Fifteen fire departments and roughly 80 to 90 personnel responded, drawing crews from as far as Nampa and Eagle. US Highway 30 was closed through downtown for hours while crews worked. The Idaho State Fire Marshal's Office, whose investigator Knute Sandahl described the building's unstable walls as a hazard for his own crews, took over the origin and cause investigation, which by all available reporting is still open.
The flower shop next door was saved, largely because a narrow alley worked as a natural firebreak. The salon wasn't as lucky. Its owner, Teneille Hogge, had run Shear Attitude on that corner for 15 years. In the days after the fire she told a local TV crew she planned to keep going. The salon was demolished within weeks. The saloon building took longer to come down, with crews closing a stretch of the southbound lane for six to seven hours in mid-December just to clear the bar section.
Ten months later, the lot is still fenced dirt. In July, the New Plymouth City Council unanimously approved a 90-day demolition permit extension for the site while the owner, Robin Cusma, works through an insurance payout delay reported at $135,000. That extension buys time. It doesn't rebuild anything.
Where That Leaves the Walk This Fall
Put those two stories next to each other and the picture of downtown New Plymouth this September is less a straight line than a horseshoe with one open link and one open wound. The federally funded pathway moved on a construction schedule and hit its target, opening in time for Fair week the way it was supposed to. The insurance claim on a fire-damaged corner is moving on its own schedule, and that schedule has already stretched past ten months.
Neither timeline is unusual on its own. Federally backed infrastructure grants like TAP funding come with fixed disbursement windows and inspection checkpoints that tend to keep projects moving once they start. Insurance settlements on total-loss commercial structures, especially when multiple businesses and adjoining walls are involved, routinely take longer than anyone standing outside the fence would like. What's unusual is watching both processes play out on the same two-block stretch of the same historic Boulevard at the same time, so that a walk that used to dead-end at gravel now runs clean and current right up to a corner that hasn't moved since demolition wrapped last winter.
For now, the walk itself is worth taking. Start at the Fairgrounds, follow the new asphalt down past the water wheels on Southwest First, note the still-standing Tuttle Blacksmith Shop as you round the bend, and you'll hit the fresh striping near Maple before the fence comes into view. It's the same horseshoe New Plymouth has always had. This is just the first fall where you can walk most of it without leaving the pavement.
If you're watching that corner too, or just want someone who tracks New Plymouth's small changes as closely as its big ones, Two Rivers Real Estate Company is glad to compare notes whenever you're ready to work with us.
