Brad Feldman remembers the exact moment the worst of it ended. Driving under the railroad bridge on Memorial Highway, he looked up and saw no orange cones for the first time in months. "It was like I made it," he told a Bismarck TV crew this July, describing the stretch of road his coffee shop sits on.
Feldman owns Classic Rock Coffee, and his shop sits on what everyone around Mandan just calls the Strip, the retail corridor that runs along Memorial Highway from Main Street out toward the Missouri River bridge. For three years now, that road has been torn up, rebuilt, torn up again, and rebuilt some more, in a two-phase reconstruction project that started in April 2025 and won't finish until around November 2027. The easy assumption is that a road this disrupted for this long should be strangling the businesses along it. Track what's actually happened block by block, though, and the picture is more specific than that. Some businesses have taken a real hit. Others have opened in the middle of the mess and are staying open. And the corridor's most stubborn vacancy has nothing to do with construction at all.
What Counts as "The Strip"
Memorial Highway carried about 16,825 vehicles a day in 2023, a number engineers project will climb to roughly 21,710 once the rebuild is finished, according to a trade publication covering the project. The road itself is the problem the construction is solving. It's a five-lane undivided highway with no sidewalks, aging pavement, and a drainage system so thin that ditches along the corridor used to flood between businesses because the culverts couldn't move water fast enough. None of that is cosmetic. It's why the project exists.
The rebuild runs in two phases:
- Phase 1 covered the east side, from 32nd Avenue SE to 46th Avenue SE, starting in April 2025 with a construction budget just under $38 million, funded 48 percent federal, 29 percent state, and 23 percent city.
- Phase 2 covers the west side, from Main Street to 32nd Avenue SE, starting in spring 2026 with a budget of about $69.5 million, funded 63 percent federal, 11 percent state, and 26 percent city.
Phase 2 began in September 2026 and now stretches from the overpass at Main Street down to Midway Lanes, the bowling alley that's become the project's unofficial landmark. City engineer Jarek Wigness has said the project's completion date is targeted for around November 2027, meaning the corridor most Mandan residents drive without thinking twice has another full year of active work ahead.
Who Actually Got Hurt
Feldman's coffee shop is the clearest documented case of construction actually costing a Strip business money, and the detail that matters is timing. Memorial Highway construction started in April 2025, but Feldman said Classic Rock Coffee wasn't affected until the fall of that year, when customer traffic slowed enough that making payroll got difficult. The disruption wasn't the presence of construction. It was a specific stretch, roughly October and November 2025, when crews brought in what Feldman described as an army of workers and equipment and sales dropped fast.
Carol Sundberg, who owns SignPro on the east side of the highway, was worried well before that. Back in March 2025, as the project was just getting underway, she told a reporter her customers are truckers and contractors, and she was bracing for the kind of access problems that make it hard for that specific customer base to reach her. Her worry predates the worst of the actual disruption by months, which says something about how construction anxiety and construction impact don't always move on the same schedule. The road being torn up isn't automatically the same as business drying up. For some owners it took a specific surge of activity, months into the project, to actually show up in the register.
Who Opened Anyway
If construction were simply bad for business on the Strip, you wouldn't expect anyone new to bet on it mid-project. Two moves this year say otherwise.
Chopsticks and Fries opened on Memorial Highway in August 2026, right in the middle of Phase 2. The restaurant is owned by David Bik and Van Hnem, who came to the United States from Myanmar around 15 years ago, met, married, and ran a bar in Devils Lake before opening this location. Their menu pairs sushi and sashimi with American comfort food, a combination customers have already picked favorites from. One regular singled out the French dip and the Philly on the American side, and the California roll and shrimp tempura on the sushi side, plus a specialty called the TNT roll that she says "comes with fire."
A second, larger commitment is coming next summer. Tri-Energy Cooperative is building a Sonic Drive-In attached to a Cenex gas station and convenience store near the roundabout at Collins Avenue, close to the new Mandan High School and the Starion Sports Complex. It will be only the fourth Sonic location in North Dakota. Tri-Energy's CEO, Jeremy Barth, framed the location choice around the neighborhood growing up around it, saying the business wanted "a convenient place to stop, fuel up, grab a meal" for the families, students, and athletes who'll be nearby. That's not a business hedging against a rough corridor. That's a company building a permanent structure on the assumption that this stretch of Mandan is only getting busier.
The Lot That Isn't Moving
Set against those two openings is a single corner that hasn't changed in years for reasons that have nothing to do with road work. The former Colonial Bar sat on the Strip for more than 60 years before it closed, reportedly a casualty of the pandemic, and was demolished in 2020. As of last year, the lot was still vacant and still on the market, sitting on some of the most visible frontage on the corridor thanks to its easy access to the highway and I-94. Locals have speculated for years about what might eventually fill it. None of that speculation has anything to do with construction timelines. The Colonial site was empty before Memorial Highway construction started and has stayed empty through it, which is the clearest evidence that not every vacancy on this corridor is a construction casualty. Some are just about price, ownership, or a seller waiting for the right offer.
The City's Answer to "Just Wait It Out"
Mandan hasn't treated the construction as something businesses simply have to survive on their own. During Phase 2, the city worked with Mandan Progress on a program that gives shoppers a 25 percent bonus for spending at businesses along Memorial Highway, structured as a gift card reimbursement. Wigness described it as the city's attempt to keep dollars flowing to the corridor while access is harder than usual. The city has also promised better signage and clearer access points during Phase 2 than it managed during Phase 1, a direct response to complaints from owners like Sundberg during the first round of work.
None of this erases the disruption. A three-year rebuild on a road that carries close to 17,000 vehicles a day is going to cost some businesses real money, and Classic Rock Coffee's fall 2025 slowdown proves it. But the corridor's story isn't simply construction versus commerce. It's businesses reading the disruption differently depending on their customer base, their timing, and whether the thing holding them back was ever really about the road in the first place.
If you're watching the Strip change block by block and have questions about what any of this means for a specific address or lot along the corridor, Moving with Melanie tracks Mandan's commercial and residential shifts as closely as its listings. Reach out anytime with what you're seeing on your own drive down Memorial Highway.
