For years, if you drove Springs Road NE past 12th Avenue, the strip mall storefront at 2419 Springs Road held a Hungry Howie's. It's one of those addresses you clock without thinking about, the kind of landmark that only registers because you've passed it a thousand times on the way to somewhere else. Last year the sign changed. The space is now Dough Re Mi Artisan Bagels, run by a husband-and-wife team, Lucas and Rachel Gabriel, and it is the first genuinely new thing to happen on this stretch of the corridor in longer than most residents can place.
That single swap matters less for what it sells than for what it says about how this part of Northeast Hickory actually works. Springs Road isn't a destination corridor. It doesn't have a business association or a branded arts district or a construction project with a ribbon-cutting date attached to it. It has a tire shop, a car care garage, an equipment rental yard, an indoor gun range, and now a bagel case. That combination is the neighborhood's real character, and it's worth understanding on its own terms rather than as a warm-up act for downtown.
What Dough Re Mi Actually Is
The Gabriels are turning out New York and New Jersey style bagels, hand-rolled, with nine standard flavors that rotate seasonally alongside pastries and coffee. A limited run of plain and gluten-free bagels is available most days, and the shop keeps a few vegan options on the board as well. Lucas Gabriel has said the goal with the menu is straightforward: nobody with a dietary restriction should feel left out. Regulars who order the gluten-free batch report that it's typically made on weekends, with the kitchen cleaned and sanitized between runs, so calling ahead on a weekday is the safer bet if that's what you're after.
The bagels don't stay confined to Springs Road, either. Gabriel sells at area farmers markets, and you can also pick up Dough Re Mi bagels at Happy Sips, the specialty coffee shop tucked into the Harris Arcade breezeway in downtown Hickory. That's a small but telling detail: a Northeast Hickory bakery supplying a downtown coffee shop is the kind of cross-pollination that happens in a city this size, where a new business doesn't need a marketing campaign to find its customers, just a few good relationships.
The Corridor That Never Needed a Rebrand
Stay on the same stretch of road and you'll pass Springs Road Car Care on 12th Avenue NE, White Tire Center up at 2614 Springs Road, Springs Road Rent-Alls at 3351, and the Springs Road Gun Club at 3462. None of these businesses are new. None of them are trying to be anything other than what they've always been. White Tire Center's longtime customers describe decades of loyalty in almost identical language, calling the shop honest and noting they've
"always gotten great tires and best service."
That's not the language of a business chasing foot traffic from a new trail or gallery walk. It's the language of a neighborhood that runs on reliability, where the same family has been fixing your car or mounting your tires long enough that you stopped comparison shopping years ago.
This is the part of Northeast Hickory that doesn't show up in visitor guides, and it's not supposed to. A gun club, a rental yard, and an auto shop aren't attractions. They're infrastructure, the kind of businesses a neighborhood needs functioning quietly in the background so residents can get their oil changed, rent a pressure washer for the weekend, or take a concealed carry class without driving across town. Village Inn Pizza Parlor rounds out the stretch at 2467 Springs Road, open seven days a week, the kind of standing option you default to on a night nobody wants to cook.
The thesis here isn't that Springs Road is secretly exciting. It's that its value to residents has never depended on excitement. A new bagel shop landing in the same strip mall that used to smell like pizza is a bigger deal here precisely because change on this corridor is rare enough to notice.
The Park a Few Minutes Over
If you're building a Saturday morning around the bagel shop, St. Stephens Park on 36th Avenue NE is worth knowing about even if you've never had a reason to visit. It's a nine-acre Catawba County park designed, in the county's own description, to feel like a respite from a fast-paced world despite sitting right against the edge of the city. A third-of-a-mile hiking loop starts at the picnic area, cuts through a planted garden, and continues into a wooded section that feels considerably more remote than its size would suggest.
The park's most distinctive feature is something you won't find at most city parks in the region: the LITeracy Trail, a paved path built around literature, information, and technology themes, winding through a garden planted specifically to draw butterflies and hummingbirds. The county's own materials note that the creek bottom habitat draws red foxes, wild turkeys, spotted salamanders, raccoons, opossums, and on occasion a white squirrel. There's also a fenced, one-acre dog park with a separate section for dogs under 30 pounds, which makes it a genuine option for anyone whose Saturday routine already includes a walk with the dog and doesn't want to drive across town to get one.
None of this is marketed the way downtown Hickory markets its trail network or its music series. St. Stephens Park doesn't have a business association behind it or a multi-year construction timeline generating headlines. It's just there, a short drive from the Springs Road corridor, doing exactly what a county park is supposed to do for the neighborhood immediately around it.
What Actually Changed
Put the two threads together and the real story on Springs Road isn't reinvention. It's continuity with one new addition. The tire shop, the car care garage, the rental yard, and the gun club are still exactly what they've always been. Village Inn Pizza is still open seven days a week. St. Stephens Park's LITeracy Trail and its fox-and-salamander creek bottom haven't changed either. The one thing that moved is that a strip mall slot that used to smell like pizza now smells like fresh bagels, and a husband-and-wife team is quietly building relationships with a downtown coffee shop and a rotation of area farmers markets.
That's a small, specific change, and it's the kind that only registers if you already know what the corridor looked like before. It's also exactly the kind of change that doesn't require the neighborhood to become something else. Springs Road didn't get an arts district or a construction contract. It got one new business that fits into a stretch defined by reliability rather than reinvention, and that's a fair description of how most of Northeast Hickory actually changes over time: slowly, one storefront at a time, without anyone needing to rename the road.
If you're weighing what a specific address on this side of Hickory is actually worth, or you're curious how a corridor like Springs Road factors into a home's value compared to a more heavily marketed part of town, the team at Osborne Real Estate Group knows this stretch of Catawba County block by block. Reach out anytime for a free home valuation grounded in what's actually happening on your street, not just the citywide averages.
