Winn-Dixie on 29th Street

Winn-Dixie with prominent "Marketplace" signage, unknown date. Courtesy Michael Gomez (used with permission) Twenty years ago today (February 21, 2005), Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. declared bankruptcy. When I started writing this post back in January, it appeared to be heading toward an ignominious end under parent company Aldi. Earlier this month, though, C&S Wholesale Grocers purchased 170 stores (including Harveys, as well as some associated liquor stores) with the associated trademarks from Aldi Süd. Still, with 170 stores spread across five states and C&S's incredibly bad track record at "rescuing" chains (one reason why the courts X'd their purchase of Albertsons/Kroger cast-offs), the future still looks quite dim.

In better days, however, Winn-Dixie had locations spread across much of the Southeastern United States (with about 1,000 stores in 1999) and that included two locations in the area, and was part of several other major regional and national chains for what was a very small market in the early 1990s, with the chain, along with AppleTree, Randalls, Albertsons, Kroger, and H-E-B Pantry participating. (One article I have when the College Station location closed mentioned it was probably the most grocery store square footage to capita market in the country).

Despite the closure of the relatively short-lived College Station store and spending much of the 1990s sandwiched halfway between AppleTree and Randall's (later Albertsons), it still operated until the chain departed Texas for good in 2002.

Opened in May 1985, the 45,000 square feet store offered the typical supermarket features of the time including a "New York-style delicatessen and bakery". The paper also mentioned a "prestige meat" department, that was what Winn-Dixie called its meat department in those days and I imagine the inside of the Bryan store looked much the same way. This anchored the new Carter Creek Shopping Center.

Unfortunately, by the late 1990s, Winn-Dixie's problems were apparent through the company. Already by 1996, with their competition locally (Kroger, Albertsons, AppleTree, and H-E-B Pantry) having two or more stores compared to Winn-Dixie's one, no stores in any of the major Texas cities except for Dallas-Fort Worth (and at least in 5th place behind Kroger, Tom Thumb, Albertsons, and Minyard) and Waco-Temple-Killeen, Winn-Dixie seemed to finally catch a break in 1999 as they hammered out a deal with Kroger where they would offload the entire Texas Division to Kroger for an undisclosed price (rumored to be $350M), pending FTC approval.

This would allow Kroger entrance to Oklahoma (where it had no stores and still doesn't), Waco-Temple-Killeen, a few smaller markets, and give Kroger four stores by the end of the 2000, with their new Rock Prairie "Signature" store, their existing College Station store, and their existing Bryan store. Unfortunately for both parties, the FTC did not approve (even though it was trivial compared to the later Albertsons/Kroger merger later attempted (which still failed) with the deal now dead, Kroger walked away. Instead, in 2002, Winn-Dixie closed the entire Texas Division.

That of course left Carter Creek Shopping Center without an anchor tenant. The store's address, 4001 E. 29th Street, was shared with the whole shopping center, so it's hard to find much information on other tenants and gain a clear picture of what was going on. Personally, I don't remember much of the center and I don't think it was ever well-populated, but from 2001 to 2012 a location of Tuesday Morning was located here, before it relocated to Post Oak Square. There were a few others (Career Apparel, Amish Furniture for Generations). By early 2004, Workforce Solutions had moved into the former Winn-Dixie (new address--3991 E. 29th Street) and other government offices moved in soon after.

There were/are other tenants in the shopping center as well. There are two buildings near the light at Carter Creek Parkway, one of which holds Pride Cleaners (Pride 1 Hr. Cleaners until the late 2000s/early 2010s). There was a Dollar General at suite 102 from 1993 to 2007, a DoubleDave's Pizzaworks from 1986 to 1997 (one of the early locations), and a restaurant, Wokamole Healthy Cuisine has somehow hung on for ten years at suite 106 (opened late 2014). The restaurant originally opened as a hybrid Chinese/Mexican restaurant (it replaced another Mexican restaurant called El Gallito de Jalisco, and the spot had been mostly restaurants going back years) though within a year the Mexican menu was dropped entirely.

Ol' J.W.'s Country Store (East 29th Street)

More accurately, Ol' J.W. don't mess with Superman's lawyers.
This one was a bit harder to track down the history of, since the gas station did not seem to have a phone number and thus the phone directories were useless. It opened in November 1983 with a Philips 66 gas station (as per the Eagle ad above) and eventually became a Diamond Shamrock (along with the Highway 6/Boonville store mentioned), then a Valero (with "Corner Store", as Valero had rebranded all convenience stores to be), then Circle K (but still with Valero). The Hwy. 21/19th Street location later became a Fina and now serves as a small restaurant. As of this writing, the East 29th gas station today still shows as a Corner Store on Google Maps.

UPDATE 05-28-2023: Google Maps Street View has shown the "modern" Circle K/Valero station at 4609 E. 29th Street for a while now. You can see use the time slider feature to see the old Corner Store, though.

Former Ken Martin's Safari Grille

Apart from being in generally poor shape, notice that the STEAK HOUSE was removed first. Picture by author, 2013.

Although Ken Martin's Steakhouse didn't start here at 3231 East 29th Street (it was originally located at 1803 S. Texas Avenue, an auto dealership now) it did end here. Over the years, the Ken Martin restaurant empire included three Pepe's restaurants all in College Station-Bryan, with one at Post Oak Mall co-branded with steakhouse spinoff "Ken Martin's Chicken Fried Steak", Pepper's (a hamburger shop about where Harvey Washbangers is now), Fort Shiloh Steakhouse, and a few others. This building started out as an upscale restaurant called Pacific Coast Highway (1982-1984, though I suspect the exterior was different), with Ken Martin's Steakhouse moving in around 1985. Sometime around 2005 (correct me if I'm wrong, here), Ken Martin's rebranded to "Ken Martin's Safari Grille", which updated and expanded the menu (though, despite the new theme, did not add exotic meats to the menu).

The menu for the Safari Grill is below.

Because I scanned it from a phone book (still very much intact), some of the letters were blurred. That should be "aged to perfection and hand-cut", "garlic mashed potatoes", "texture and robust taste", prices down the line were 9.99, 12.99, 10.99, 14.99, 3.99, 1.99.

For the seafood, "served with rice pilaf", "served with our homemade", the Breaded Golden Fried Shrimp is 9.99.
For the chicken, "lightly breaded and fried", "topped with pineapple", "served with". Extra shrimp with the chicken is 3.99.

In December 2011, after about four decades of serving chicken fried steaks, Ken and his wife retired from the restaurant business and shuttered Ken Martin's forever.

UPDATE 02-28-2023 : A few things were changed since the last update in 2020, mostly streamlining and correcting dates.

The Burger King Near Blinn

From August 2019 with the gas station recently de-Rattled. Picture by author.
When I first made this post back in January 2012, it was titled "The Terrible Food at Blinn", which was a rant on how awful the food was at Blinn compared to my new digs at A&M (which only lasted one semester before food was outsourced to Compass/Chartwells). I have no idea what Blinn's current offerings are like but was astounded at what awful quality it was: there were very few places to eat on campus at all. There were vending machines (overpriced more than usual), the college bookstore with a small selection of convenience store items (Pop-Tarts were the usual item of choice here, despite an obvious push to stock more "healthy" items), and the student center having two "food court" type establishments, both of which were absolutely terrible, "Clux Delux" and "Block & Barrel". Clux Delux, according to what the packaging stating was supposed to be a bit like a poor man's Chick-fil-A, but it was just cafeteria food sitting under heat lamps, with cartoonishly bad everything. Unidentifiable gloop, an item on the menu literally listed as "chicken chunks"...Clux Delux had it all. Block & Barrel was just pre-packaged items including soggy, plastic-wrapped sandwiches (when were they made? who knows!)

This was depressing to me, as way back when Blinn was opening the Student Center building in the early 2000s, it had real fast food, one of which was a Taco Bell (I suspect the other was a Yum! Brands restaurant). Indeed, underneath the cheap banners of CD and B&B, you could see holes drilled in where the restaurant signs once were...and you know you're in for a real disappointment when Taco Bell is considered high cuisine to whatever they served.

Naturally, no one but the desperate wanted to eat the overpriced slop at the student center, so the nearest go-to place was a Burger King at the corner of 29th and Villa Maria, and due to schedules, was still too long to be walked to and from. Opened in 2007 along with an adjacent Rattlers', the first new Burger King in town in over two decades (certainly slow compared to the growth of the city's McDonald's restaurants). My memories of it were thinking it was grimier than the typical Burger King, and also around 2011 or 2012 when they switched to having monitors for the menu instead of just the normal menu system that slid to show breakfast and lunch items at different times.

The Rattlers', of course, is still branded as such, despite the takeover of the chain by Stripes. The chain's Shell stations have all been converted to Sunoco stations, but the Exxon-branded Rattlers' remain, for some reason. Or at least they would, except this is no longer a Rattlers', and instead a generic Exxon convenience store as of August 2019. (It also throws the other Exxon Rattlers', like the store on Boonville and Highway 6, or the one in Navasota, into doubt). This seems to have happened very recently, it's even still on the Stripes store locator page (#5258) as of this writing but lacks even the Stripes drink cups. The convenience store is at 2411 East 29th Street whereas Burger King is at 2401.

As an update to the above written, as of March 2020, the name of the convenience store is now called "Rustlers Den", a similar name to the Rattlers except with red lettering.

Chicken Express, Downtown Bryan

The Chicken Express here didn't look much different from the Burger King it replaced (you can see that picture on Yelp). This picture is from August 2019 by the author.
The Chicken Express at the corner of South Texas Avenue and East 29th Street is rather pedestrian, and probably would not have been covered had it not had a previous tenant that had fond memories for me. As a kid living and growing up in College Station (this was originally named "College Station Roads & Retail", after all), going to downtown Bryan was a fairly rare occurrence. Of these trips, most of them were to the downtown Greyhound bus station where relatives would often come down by bus (Waco or Houston), including cousins and my grandfather. This is why Chicken Express is covered, is because of that bus station (located at 405 East 29th Street).

Granted, it was dirty and run-down especially by the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I've been told the building started out as a UtoteM (and that may have had Amoco gas, from what I've heard) and became a bus station by 1980. I don't think it was remodeled much at all between tenants, and it had a drop ceiling, florescent lighting, really worn tiles, possibly dated from 1960s to 1970s, some rather drab and cheap-looking chairs, and the like. There were a few vending machines, including some candy dispensers and (if I remember right) even a coffee vending machine. While it was a miserable place that seemed to be falling apart, it had charm (though I'm sure I'm the only one that thinks that) as a wonderfully grungy place that was a gritty time capsule of the 1980s.

After it was torn down in the late 2000s, the replacement of the store was a Burger King with the address of 401 South Texas Avenue (ironically, despite the new Texas Avenue address, the site was rebuilt to not allow access to Texas Avenue), part of a proposed bunch of new stores as part of a new franchisee. The new Burger King opened around April 2009 and closed in January 2011 (but not reopening). Reason was probably because B-CS just isn't a Burger King town (the one at Texas and Deacon seems to get pretty low volume). It reopened as a Chicken Express some months later (2012 I believe) which did little to the restaurant except give it red trim instead of blue (and serve an entirely different menu under new ownership and a new name, of course).

The redevelopment into Chicken Express also demolished a building (built as a house, though it likely was no longer serving as residential by the time it was torn down) at the corner of 29th and South Houston Avenue. This may be researched in a further update.

Updated in July 2020 to further expunge the original "downtown Bryan memory" format