Saturday morning, the Dundee Day parade turned east onto Underwood Avenue from the entrance to Memorial Park and rolled toward 49th Street, the same route it has followed for years. Scout Troop 100 handed out pancakes in the CHI parking lot. A 5K start line formed at 8:30. By afternoon a community mural was taking shape near 50th and Underwood. If you live in Dundee, you already know this. What you might not have clocked yet is how different the two blocks around that parade route look now compared to a year ago, and why the newest additions to Underwood Avenue keep showing up in places that were never meant to hold a crowd.
What Showed Up Since the Last Parade
The most obvious new stop is Duck Duck Bottle Shop, which opened in May at 4917 Underwood Avenue, directly across from Ooh De Lally's Fox Den. It's easy to miss on a drive-by because there's no front-door entrance. You walk in through the driveway, past a hundred-year-old house, into a backyard that used to be, by the owners' own description, mostly dead grass. Now it holds picnic tables, bistro sets, a small performance stage, and native plantings that draw pollinators instead of foot traffic. The bottle shop and a rotating book selection live in the basement. Chloe Fortina, who co-owns Duck Duck with Casey Fictum, told a reporter she wanted a space that "feels like it's evolving with the people and the nature in and around it." Fortina is originally from Omaha and comes from the family behind Rockbrook Camera, so this isn't an outside operator testing the market. It's a third-generation small business owner rebuilding a piece of her own neighborhood.
A few doors down, at 4915 Underwood, Elleon has been listed as coming soon since at least February. It's billed as a European-forward wine lounge with tasting events and pop-up dinners, which gives this three-address run of Underwood two wine-forward concepts before either one has had a full year to settle in.
Here's the short version of what's arrived or is still arriving on Underwood Avenue over the past year:
- Duck Duck Bottle Shop — 4917 Underwood Avenue, opened May 2026, backyard bar and bottle shop with a basement book nook
- Elleon — 4915 Underwood Avenue, wine lounge, listed as coming soon
- Pitch Pizzeria — 5021 Underwood Avenue, reopened in June 2025 after a fire, still the anchor at the west end of the strip
- A brewery reported under construction in Pitch's former party room, and a farm co-op reported to be moving in across the street, both first confirmed in mid-2025 and not yet publicly confirmed as open
Old Houses, Not Storefronts
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only see the headlines about new openings: almost none of this is happening in a purpose-built commercial space. Duck Duck took over a converted house. Elleon is going into another Underwood Avenue address in a strip that is, structurally, a row of century-old residential buildings that got zoned commercial decades ago. Pitch's brewery, if it opens, will live inside a party room that already existed as part of a working restaurant rather than as new construction.
Dundee doesn't have room to build outward. It's Omaha's original 1900s suburb, laid out with tree-lined residential blocks pressed right up against a two-block retail spine, and that geography hasn't changed since it was platted. What has changed is what people are willing to do with the leftover square footage behind and beneath those buildings. A backyard nobody was using becomes an outdoor bar. A basement becomes a bottle shop and reading room. A party room becomes a brewery. The neighborhood isn't growing by adding buildings. It's growing by finding new uses for the ones already standing.
That matters if you live here, because it means the character of new businesses on Underwood Avenue will keep skewing toward small, idiosyncratic, and outdoors-first rather than toward anything that requires a large commercial footprint. You're not going to see a drive-through or a big-box format squeeze into this stretch. You are going to keep seeing things like a bar with a stage built for poetry readings as often as live music, because that's what fits in the space that's actually available.
The Two That Aren't Finished Yet
Worth being straight about: the brewery and the farm co-op reported near Pitch Pizzeria were first confirmed by ownership in mid-2025, and there's no public confirmation either has opened as of this writing. Dean Liesman, one of Pitch's owners, was on record welcoming the farm co-op as a neighbor specifically because of how close fresh produce needs to be to where it's grown to actually taste different. Whether that timeline held is the kind of thing you'll only know for certain by walking past and looking, which, on a two-block strip, isn't much of an ask.
The Rhythm Worth Knowing
Underwood Avenue already runs on a schedule if you know where to look for it. On the third Saturday of every month from April through October, the Dundee-Memorial Park Association brings a different local musician to the corner of 50th and Underwood for a two-hour set from 6 to 8pm. Dundee Day just happened on August 22, which means the next Third Saturday show lands on September 19. Earlier this summer, when Smokey Robinson headlined the free Memorial Park concert on June 26, Dundee's merchants promoted a pre-party from 4 to 7pm specifically so concertgoers would grab dinner and a drink on Underwood before walking down to the park.
None of this is engineered by a single organization. It's closer to a pattern that's built up over years of a walkable retail strip sitting next to a park, a bank, and a coal-fired pizza place that's been there since before most of the new bars existed. If you're parking for any of it, there's a lot west of Pitch, street parking, spots behind Dundee Bank during posted hours, and a pay lot at KFAB, all within the same two blocks.
What's changed isn't the rhythm. It's the number of places to be part of it. A year ago, an evening on Underwood Avenue meant Pitch, Avoli, or the Dell. Now it can also mean a backyard behind a stranger's old house, a basement full of books and bottles, or a wine lounge that hasn't opened its doors yet but already has an address. For a neighborhood that can't build outward, that's still growth. It's just growth you have to walk into a driveway to see.
If you're already watching how Dundee keeps reinventing its own square footage, you're the kind of resident who tends to know a good property when one comes up on this stretch before it ever hits a public listing. Missy Ruff keeps close tabs on Dundee and the rest of the Omaha metro for exactly that reason. Contact Missy if a move around here is ever part of your own plans.
