For the better part of two decades, the block where Windsor Road meets Exposition Boulevard was defined more by what had left than by what had arrived. The old Tarrytown Shopping Center, built in 1939 by the Crusemann and Graham families and often described as the oldest of its kind in Austin, spent the 2000s shedding its long-tenured anchors. The Holiday House, Texas French Bread, Formosa, the Broaddus Chevron station, one after another, either closed or moved out during owner Jeanne Daniels' well-documented restrictions on animal products, a saga Texas Monthly chronicled at length back in 2007.
The interesting thing about the summer of 2026 is not that Tarrytown has reinvented itself. It hasn't. What has quietly happened is that the Windsor corridor is finally being refilled, and the new tenants share a shape with the ones the neighborhood lost. That is the thesis of this note: the shopping-center-as-neighborhood-hub function residents used to take for granted is being reassembled, one storefront and one trailer at a time.
What actually opened on Windsor this spring
The most concrete signal came in April. Community Kitchen and Taproom opened at 3110 Windsor Rd., serving plant-based versions of fried chicken, surf and turf, and barbecue plates alongside classic Southern sides, from co-owners Marlon Rison and Ericka Dotson, who first launched the business five years ago as Community Vegan, a food truck operating out of a brightly painted 1973 Winnebago on East 11th Street. The address matters. The restaurant sits between Pak Mail and Austin Pets Alive, facing Windsor Road. That is the same shopping strip that held the Holiday House. There is a symmetry to a vegan comfort-food concept moving into the block where Daniels' restrictions once emptied the retail mix; the current tenant is, so to speak, on-brand with the landlord.
A few doors' worth of parking spaces away, Bésame, a spot for ice cream, coffee, and other treats, opened a second food truck in Tarrytown with a soft opening in early April. Bésame is a small operator, not a chain, and the trailer format keeps it porous to foot traffic rather than sealed off behind a hostess stand.
Read these two openings against the older tenant roster, and the picture starts to sharpen. Texenza Coffee still holds its spot in the center. Tarrytown Pharmacy, in operation since 1941 and now anchored in the Casis Village side of the neighborhood, still sells prescriptions alongside cards, candles, and giftware. Fabi and Rosi, quietly one of Austin's more serious kitchens, still sits nearby. Hearth and Soul, Estilo, and L Majors Jewelers all continue to trade in the Casis Shopping Center, which changed hands in May 2023 to a partnership between Austin-based Ivy Cos. and 35 South Capital with plans, per the new owners, to renovate the facade, landscaping, and common areas. What was missing was the daytime-into-evening, walk-up-and-linger inventory. That is the gap Community Kitchen and Bésame are filling.
The Tuesday problem at Deep Eddy
If you have a summer routine built around Deep Eddy's ten-lane, 100-foot-long lap pool, spring-fed and holding between 68 and 70 degrees year-round, 2026 asks you to redraw it. Deep Eddy Pool at 401 Deep Eddy Ave. reopened on Monday, April 13, 2026, after annual spring cleaning and maintenance, and beginning April 21 it now closes every Tuesday for cleaning.
A weekly closure is a small change on paper and a large change on the calendar. Lap swimmers who used Tuesday mornings as their quietest slot lose that window entirely. The city's suggested alternates read as follows.
| Pool | Where it fits into a Tarrytown week |
|---|---|
| Reed Park pool | Inside the neighborhood; short walk from most of Tarrytown; seasonal hours |
| Barton Springs | Iconic but crowded on any hot Tuesday |
| Big Stacy, Bartholomew, Springwoods, Colony Park | The four other year-round pools Austin Parks explicitly named as alternatives during the closure |
The Reed Park option deserves its own paragraph.
Reed Park is closer than most residents use it
Reed Park is a 6.37-acre neighborhood park at 2614 Pecos St., gifted to the City in 1953 by Mrs. Fagan Dickson, who asked that it be named for her daughters Rebecca Reed and Lucy Reed. The pool inside it is not a lap-swim substitute in the technical sense; it runs three to eight feet deep, open for lap swimming and recreation on regular seasonal hours. What Reed Park offers that Deep Eddy cannot is the walk in. Its six acres hold a shaded playground, a wide play field, winding Taylor Slough, and, at its heart, the historic Taylor Lime Kiln, built in 1871, a landmark unique to the neighborhood. For families whose Tuesday plan just evaporated, the fifteen-minute stroll to Pecos Street is the answer that requires the least logistics.
The park has an active advocacy structure, too. Friends of Reed Park is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit of neighborhood volunteers organized through the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department and the Austin Parks Foundation's Adopt-A-Park program. Locals who care about how the grounds age can attach to that group directly.
Muny at 101, and why the fairways still matter this summer
The other institution shaping a Tarrytown summer sits along Lake Austin Boulevard. The Austin Founder Lions Club and The Muny Conservancy hosted a centennial celebration for Lions Municipal Golf Course, or "Muny," on Oct. 3, marking its 100th anniversary as the first desegregated municipal golf course in the South. The course is also listed on the Registration of National Historical Places by the National Park Service, recognized as one of the first courses in the South to desegregate prior to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
For a resident who walks a dog past the fence line, the practical facts of Muny in the summer of 2026 are that it is still open, still historically the city's most popular course, still leased from the University of Texas on land whose long-term future the Muny Conservancy is actively working to secure. Each summer, Muny hosts Texas' oldest amateur tournament, the Firecracker Open, which dates back to the 1940s and boasts Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite among past champs. That the tournament is still on the calendar after last year's centennial fanfare is itself a data point on the preservation effort. You do not have to play golf to appreciate that the 141-acre green space at the neighborhood's southern edge is behaving, functionally, like a park.
A summer week, remapped
Put the pieces together and a Tuesday-through-Sunday looks less like a list of destinations and more like a route.
- Tuesday. Reed Park pool or a walk to the Taylor Lime Kiln, since Deep Eddy is dark.
- Wednesday and Thursday. Community Kitchen and Taproom is open 4 to 9 p.m. An early dinner slots cleanly after work.
- Friday. Bésame trailer for an after-school stop, then Pool Burger next to Deep Eddy for the burger-and-tiki version of a Tarrytown Friday night.
- Saturday. Muny in the morning if you play, or a coffee at Mozart's on Lake Austin if you don't. Community Kitchen serves brunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
- Sunday. Reed Park in the afternoon, Flo's for a bottle on the way home.
The point of the exercise is not to be exhaustive. It is to notice that the map, for the first time in a while, does not require a drive across MoPac to feel complete.
What all of this actually means
None of these updates on their own would move a longtime resident's week very much. Together they signal something more durable. The corridor that anchors Tarrytown's daily life is being restocked with the kind of small, owner-run, food-and-drink tenancy the neighborhood lost during the shopping-center dispute of the 2000s. Deep Eddy's new Tuesday rhythm nudges residents back toward Reed Park, which is arguably underused by the people closest to it. Muny is entering its second century with an organized preservation effort behind it, which means the 141 acres at the south edge are behaving like permanent open space rather than a redevelopment threat.
Tarrytown's most persistent quality has always been what real estate marketing here calls its "urban forest," the canopy and the quiet. What the summer of 2026 adds is a functioning main street to walk to under it.
If you own a home in Tarrytown and are thinking about the next chapter, whether that means staying and improving, selling privately, or exploring what the market looks like along Lake Austin, I would welcome a private, unhurried conversation. Reach out through Bridget Ramey to schedule a private consultation.