Drive McCullough Avenue through Olmos Park this year and you'll notice small things add up. The trim on a few storefronts got repainted. A stretch of sidewalk near the old strip got wider. The tree wells look more uniform than they did a couple of years ago.
Olmos Park has had a city-created Economic Development Corporation working on this specific half mile of McCullough since 2009, and it currently wants to hear from the people who live within walking distance of it, on a question that's open right now and won't stay that way indefinitely.
The EDC's Role on McCullough
The Olmos Park Economic Development Corporation was created with a narrow mandate: help commercial establishments inside the city succeed. That's infrastructure-level work, not marketing. It shows up as sidewalk grading, tree canopy standards, and the kind of signage guidance that makes a block read as intentional instead of accidental. None of it comes with a ribbon-cutting. All of it has been aimed at McCullough for over a decade, well before most of the current storefront names existed.
What the Grant Money Actually Touches
The EDC's current push runs under something called the McCullough Beautification Plan, and it recently added three grant programs to fund it. The grants go to businesses on McCullough making improvements to their own properties and the public space immediately around them. In plain terms, that covers the parts of a commercial strip that individual business owners rarely fund on their own because the payoff is collective rather than personal: consistent curb width, tree cover that survives a Texas summer, entryway signage that doesn't fight the building next to it, room for a table or two outside. The stated goal is a corridor that reads as connected and cared for, which in turn is supposed to make the whole stretch more economically stable, not just any single tenant on it.
Businesses Along the Corridor
The businesses on this stretch range from long-established anchors to recent arrivals.
| Business | Arrived | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Julian Gold | Operating in Olmos Park since 1945 | Specialty retail found this corridor long before any city program existed, which is why the EDC had a base worth protecting in 2009 |
| Pesto Ristorante and Bistro Vatel | Established special-occasion dinner rooms | Anchors that made McCullough a destination address after dark, long before there was daytime reason to visit |
| The Yard | A newer addition to the strip | A modern shopping center anchor that gives the corridor a second retail draw beyond food |
| Dough Baby | Opened its storefront in July 2026 | A baker with an established following chose this half mile over more obvious options nearby |
That last row is the one worth sitting with. Dough Baby's owner, Nancy Fitch, didn't need to gamble on an unproven street. She ran the Peach Cafe in Boerne for fifteen years, managed the Pearl Farmers Market for eight, and worked kitchens at Biga on the Banks and Rosario's before any of this. Her pop-up at the Pearl Farmers Market sold out of kolaches and cinnamon rolls within an hour on its first outing, then did it again, and again. Two years and four months after that first sellout, she opened a permanent storefront this July, and she put it on McCullough in Olmos Park rather than Broadway or the Pearl itself, either of which would have been the safer, more obvious bet a decade ago.
The EDC's streetscape work is a separate part of the corridor's story: it has funded sidewalk, tree-well, and signage improvements for years.
Connectivity Isn't Just a Word in a Mission Statement
The EDC's stated goals for McCullough include order, harmony, connectivity, and pride, language that could describe almost any beautification plan anywhere. But connectivity has a literal, walkable meaning here. The Olmos Basin Greenway's south trailhead sits at 651 Devine Road, a short distance off McCullough, and the trail runs shaded nearly the entire way up to Jones Maltsberger Road.
The Window That's Actually Open Right Now
The city's own homepage, olmospark.org, currently features a public feedback prompt about McCullough Avenue. Residents can use the prompt to offer feedback on McCullough's next phase.
Olmos Park is a city of roughly 2,200 residents. In a jurisdiction that size, a feedback form isn't background noise competing with thousands of other opinions. It's a short list of people who live inside a half square mile weighing in on the two-block stretch they actually walk. If you've ever wondered why a bench ended up where it did, or wished a certain corner had more shade, this is the mechanism, and it's open now.
McCullough has changed over time and will continue to evolve. Residents can share their views on the next round of decisions this month. If you're weighing what a home on this stretch of Olmos Park means for how you'll actually use the neighborhood day to day, or thinking about timing a move around how the corridor keeps evolving, Claudia Wheeler knows this block by block. Let's Connect.
