This post originally was a stand-alone post written in the wake of the demolition of the "Plaza Hotel" but a 2026 rewrite integrated it as a sub-article to Northpoint Crossing. This post has also gone through many, many revisions. It got an extensive update in June 2019 after fifteen previous updates, and another one on October 9, 2025 ("Doing a bit more research, the hotel was Ramada Inn until 1988 when it became "University Inn" then reopened in 1989 as University Tower with hotel and private dorm facilities. Some new labels added.").
College Station's original Ramada Inn was built on the personal request of James Earl Rudder, recruiting restaurateur Joe Ferreri (who had success running two other restaurants in town, Triangle Drive-In and Sugar 'N Spice. The site was chosen in 1962, at the northwest corner of Highway 6 and Sulphur Springs Road (Texas Avenue and University Drive, as they would later be known), wrapping around an existing Gulf station (see the main article) and announcing it would include "between 100 and 120 rooms, a convention hall accommodating approximately 600 people, the Ramada Inn Pancake House, two other dining rooms, a series of meeting rooms, a swimming pool and a playground area for children." (It would end up being built with 169 rooms, and the ballroom to host 800 people).
A classified in July 1962 mentions that there some buildings to be moved off the Ramada Inn site, including two garage apartments and two houses "one small and one 14 room house"). If you look at the existing aerial of the site before the Ramada Inn was built, you can see more than just four structures (not including the gas station) and with the exception of the structure at University Drive and Meadowland, I can't see anything that resembles a 14-room house (it also looks like there's another commercial business next to the Gulf).
In December 19801, at the height of the hotel's success, Joe Ferreri announced that the hotel would be renovated, with a large 15-room tower with 140 additional rooms and on the first ten floors and the top five floors featuring larger condominiums ("15 large office-apartment condominiums at 1,605 square foot each and five smaller efficiency office-condos"). From reading about it some of the features promised were changed. While the pool area was enclosed and glassed in, it was to feature a retractable roof to be opened weather permitting (if this ever happened, it rarely opened). A rendering showed the north building behind the tower (this was demolished, the tower replaced it). The tower was 17 floors, not 15. There weren't balconies as promised, nor an elevator on the outside as originally planned. There was talk of additional fireproofing and fire safety, citing the recent Las Vegas hotel fire disaster that killed 85 people, as well as the fact that Ferreri had secured a 20-year renewal with Ramada Inns, Inc., which was closing down or selling older motels. This renewal was unusual as Ramada only granted 10-year contracts and did not typically offer exclusivity contracts, as they did with Brazos County. Coincidentally, there has ever been one Ramada (Inn) in Brazos County since. While this deal should've operated through 2000, it didn't operate for that long.2 The red brick of the original exterior was redone in grey stucco, however.
Around this time, a Hilton proposed by Sunbelt Hotels Inc. was planned for the southwest corner of the intersection, which would be leased by the campus3 but killed by the Attorney General at the time. It was a relief to Ferreri when this happened in May 1982 as the hotel was still under construction, but in October 1983 groundbreaking began on the current site.4
According to a June 1982 progress report, the tower topped off in June 1982 with the swimming pool enclosure (the "Sun & Fun Dome", no doubt capitalizing off the "Holidome" projects some older Holiday Inn hotels were undergoing) still building its new structure. But by the time it actually opened (probably late 1982 or early 1983) the area was in recession, and most of the condominium buyers were also going bankrupt. While it boasted 300 rooms (another article from 1988 says 363, but this seems to be wrong), the downturn in the economy had reduced hotel occupancy, meaning that the hotel was no longer filling the rooms it once did. In January 1985, Joe A. Ferreri Inc. filed for bankruptcy5, and in April 1987, the hotel was seized by Unitedbank-Houston, which failed itself just a few weeks later, putting the hotel in the hands of the FDIC, with plans to auction it off.6
In 1988, the hotel became University Inn (all the evidence suggests that Aggieland Inn at 1502 Texas Avenue bought the Ramada Inn rights) and sold to a company acting as a subsidiary of LA-based financier Leonard Ross's Rossco Holdings, after buying the Bryan Holiday Inn and renaming to Bryan Inn after not renewing the contract with Holiday Corporation.
Announcing that the hotel would become "University Hotel and Convention Center", the hotel was renovated and in 1989 was named University Tower after renovations, featuring a restaurant, a section holding luxury student dorms, and a computer center for guests.
With new UNIVERSITY TOWER signage shining in red to afar, the hotel quickly fell apart. It went from advertising as an upscale hotel (see page 4) to becoming student dorms entirely by early 1994. As Ferreri ended up going back to restaurants and opened an Italian restaurant in the former Ira's in the Kmart parking lot, Ross continued to run University Tower into the ground; the horror stories of students living in the tower are talked about to this day throughout message boards and real life. Tales of no hot water or broken down elevators live on and you'll be hard pressed to find someone who lived in and enjoyed the Tower after maybe the first or second year it opened.
In 2003, some of the dorms were converted to hotel rooms, with the gala held in one of the penthouse suites and Buzz Aldrin as the guest of honor. In 2005 the building was rebranded as the Plaza Hotel & Suites, both to mark the occasion of the dorm rooms turning back into hotel rooms, and to try to market it to the city as a convention center site. I have to assume that Leonard Ross was hoping to cash out with the Plaza Hotel, as around this time he had acquired the defunct Kettle (see the main Northpoint Crossing post) and was hoping to get rid of these in the redevelopment. In 2007, a child drowned in the pool (bad publicity), in 2008 the restaurant scored 47 on health reports due to no hot water (among other things, this was a private cafeteria back in the University Hotel days) and in 2010 the troubled hotel shut down entirely.
Vandals and trespassers began to attack the building, smashing out some of the windows (which were patched by plywood). Leonard Ross and his companies became insolvent in 2011 and in late 2011 the hotel was sold off.7
Although new owners initially planned to renovate it as student housing again with "the design [being] complementary to the Texas A&M campus", the decision was made to go ahead and demolish it. After donating any furniture that could be salvaged, recycling any material they could be recycled, and letting the police and fire departments use it for training, it was gutted, making the building resemble a parking garage (albeit a tall, narrow one) more than anything.
A massive crowd gathered to watch the demolition, conducted by the mayors of Bryan and College Station, John Sharp, and an elderly Joe Ferreri, and the main tower structure came down on May 24, 2012 at 6:40 AM. Soon after posting the original version of this post went to press, reader John E. of Southern Retail sent in some shots of what was left. Thanks!
There's also a great video on YouTube on the history of the building and the backstory of Joe Ferreri. There's great period music too, though I couldn't identify all of it.
1. The Eagle, 12/14/1980
2. If we assume that the 20-year contract was sold to Aggieland Inn and renewed for ten years as was suggested in the 1980 article, even if the Ramada brand had changed hands a few times by this point, the new Ramada opened in 2010 and the hotel had reverted to the Aggieland Inn name then. Either way it's a heck of a coincidence that these things still held...
3. Knowing what we now, I guess that trying to sell out TAMU is just in their DNA.
4. As of this writing, the Hilton article still needs a rewrite. It hasn't been updated on the site in over a decade, and much has changed since then.
5. I'm not sure if that bankruptcy was connected to the smaller Rodeway Inn Ferreri also owned, but it was lost to foreclosure either way.
6. By this time, Joe Ferreri was manager of the Aggieland Inn (see note #2). I'm sure that he had something to do with Aggieland Inn becoming a Ramada, though he didn't hold ownership.
7. Not long after Rossco went bankrupt, Ross listed his iconic $165 million mansion in Beverly Hills up for rent, then for sale before being foreclosed on and sold for $70M at auction in 2021 , a record price for an auctioned property, but far less than the $195M asking price in 2016.
UPDATE 08-16-2026: Complete rewrite as part of the new Northpoint Crossing article with the labels removed as it is now a sub-page.
