What's Actually Coming To East Edmond At I-35 And Covell
For years the northwest corner of I-35 and Covell was a promise on a rendering. ShowBiz Cinemas anchored one side, a Crest Foods sat down the road, and everything else was dirt behind a chain-link fence. That changed on March 23, 2026, when the Edmond City Council voted unanimously to put $17 million behind the Legacy at Covell retail center, and suddenly the tenant list you have been hearing about for two years has a clock on it.
If you already live in East Edmond, this post is not trying to sell you on the neighborhood. You are here. What you probably want to know is which of the rumored restaurants are real, when the doors open, and what the arrival of a second Whole Foods in the metro actually does to your weekly routine.
The tenant mix is the story. Square footage and traffic counts are fine, but what sets Legacy at Covell apart from any other suburban strip is how many of the names on the site plan are debuting in the state.
First-in-Oklahoma concepts on the current plans:
National names new to this side of town:
That is a very specific mix. A grocery anchor plus a national sporting goods anchor plus three concepts that have never operated in the state is not a bedroom-community retail center. It is a regional draw, which is exactly how the city sold it.
The most useful sentence in the March council coverage is a boring one about certificates of occupancy. Under the incentive agreement, payments only go to the developer after tenants open, receive certificates of occupancy, hold valid Oklahoma sales tax permits, and remain in operation for at least 180 days, and no incentive tied to the other tenants can be paid until both Whole Foods and Dick's Sporting Goods meet those conditions.
Translation for someone waiting on a grocery run: the developer is now financially motivated to get Whole Foods and Dick's open first, because the rest of the incentive money is locked behind them.
Whole Foods is expected to open within 12 to 14 months at Legacy at Covell, per the March 2026 reporting. That points to a spring-to-summer 2027 window for the grocer, with the surrounding restaurants and shops filling in behind it as their build-outs finish.
If you want the mechanics: the incentive money comes from the Edmond Electric Reserve Fund, and even after the payout that reserve is projected to hold a little more than $81 million. The project is expected to generate enough revenue for the city to recoup its investment within four to five years, according to city staff. The plan discussed by council centers on nine targeted retailers and about 250,000 square feet of retail space. The full council discussion is documented in NonDoc's coverage of the March 23 meeting.
The developer is Dallas-based Eric Seitz and Raptor Properties, working with Tapp Development on a project that has been in approvals since long before ground broke.
Here is where a redesigned corner stops being real estate news and starts being a Saturday. Consider what East Edmond drivers currently do:
Once Legacy at Covell is open, three of those four errands collapse into a single trip that begins at your driveway and ends inside the loop of Covell and I-35. That is the mechanism the retail incentive is buying: not new stores, but reclaimed driving time for households already inside a ten-minute radius.
The other quiet effect is on the corridor itself. The site sits off I-35 with a daytime traffic count of 65,300 vehicles per day, and the existing ShowBiz Cinemas already draws about 463,000 visits annually. Layer a grocery anchor and three destination restaurants onto that base and the intersection behaves less like an Edmond exit and more like a regional node. Expect the lights at Covell to be re-timed and the northbound frontage road to get busier on Friday nights.
A neighborhood is more than its newest tenant list, and East Edmond's daily-life geography does not actually change much. A few anchors worth remembering while the cranes are still up:
Mitch Park sits at 1501 W. Covell Road on the west side of town, with 280 scenic acres of multi-use trails, two playgrounds, a disc golf course, two basketball courts, an exercise station, volleyball court, skate park, amphitheater and athletic complex, plus five miles of paved trails. It also hosts the Winter Edmond Farmers Market and Edmond Electric's Luminance.
On the east side of Edmond, Arcadia Lake continues to be the closest real trail network. The city notes that the multiple-use trail runs approximately 6.5 miles one way from the Park Office at 9000 East 2nd Street to Spring Creek Park at 7200 Southeast 15th Street, designed to be used by mountain bikers though hikers, cross-country runners, and nature walkers also use it. It is worth mentioning because most of the new Legacy at Covell tenants are indoor, sit-down experiences. The outdoor half of East Edmond life still lives at Arcadia and Mitch Park.
And existing retail neighbors that are not going anywhere: Crest Foods, Braum's, Qdoba, Starbucks, McDonald's, and ShowBiz Cinemas already cluster near the site, which is part of what made the corner attractive to a grocer in the first place.
The Legacy at Covell openings land during what OKC's tourism office called a banner year for the restaurant scene in OKC, with 2025 seeing more openings, expansions, and first-in-state arrivals than ever before, alongside a slew of nominees at the James Beard Awards. Some of those first-in-state arrivals landed in the Horizons District and OAK OKC. East Edmond is now getting its own share of that pattern, three concepts deep.
That matters for one specific reason. When a market gets its second and third Whole Foods, or its first Shake Shack, the household calculation about where to live shifts by a small amount. It does not turn East Edmond into Nichols Hills. It does close the gap on one of the arguments buyers used to make against moving north of Memorial, which was that the good stuff was 20 minutes south.
A handful of specifics to keep an eye on if you want to track this in real time:
If you drive Covell regularly, the visible tell over the next six months will be steel going up around the Whole Foods pad. That is the moment the 12-to-14-month clock is real, not projected.
East Edmond is not gaining a shopping center. It is gaining a corner that changes which drives your household stops making. Three first-in-state restaurants, a second metro Whole Foods, and a national sporting goods anchor collapse a set of trips that currently run south and west into a single exit off I-35. The council math suggests the city recoups its $17 million in four to five years. The household math suggests you get a chunk of Saturday back.
If you are already an East Edmond resident and want a real estate advisor who tracks corridor-level changes like this and what they do to home values on the streets around them, Laura Loves Houses is built for exactly that conversation. When you are ready to talk about how the Covell corridor is shaping value on your block, schedule a consultation and let's walk through it.
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