College Station's Kmart / College Station Shopping Plaza

The former store as it stood c. late 2010


The shopping center at the northwest corner of Harvey Mitchell Parkway and Texas Avenue has a long and storied history. This post originally went up in June 1, 2010 and has been added and edited to over the years, with the most recent update from 2026.

The seeds of Kmart's demise and disappearance from this country have been fairly well documented and discussed these days, and while College Station got one during its meteoric rise in the 1960s and 1970s, it also was one of the victims in the first major closing round.

Kmart #7013 opened at 2700 Texas Avenue South on May 18, 1974, not long after the opening of FM 2818, the "West Loop". Unusually for Texas Avenue, it was not located on the road directly, instead on the frontage roads that curved into FM 2818. While it was one of the smallest store designs, the store also featured an adjacent grocery store as well, Lewis & Coker.¹

The stores did have an interior connection, but not for very long, as the whole Kmart Foods program was already on its way out at the time of the store opening. The Kmart was typical of stores of that era: a white slanted roof and ridged concrete. Lewis & Coker would close this store in the late 1970s with Piggly Wiggly taking over in 1977. The changeover was similar to the gutting of AppleTree years later, quickly go through and change prices in around 48 hours. The store was only about 19,000 square feet (of selling space) and was the only local Piggly Wiggly to have a bakery. In summer 1985 Piggly Wiggly closed (the two Bryan locations would go soon after) and in 1988 Kmart found a new neighbor across the street that would ultimately contribute to the store's closure (and would do irreparable damage to the chain as a whole)...Wal-Mart. Kmart expanded into the old Piggly Wiggly space and did change to the 1990s logo soon after but didn't do anything beyond that.


Kmart advertising in a 1976 Texas A&M-Texas Tech basketball program

In February 1995, Kmart closed as part of a round of closings announced in 1994. It wasn't surprising since the expansion never even added automatic doors, Wal-Mart already began an expansion and remodel, and a Target opened up the road in 1992. Target remained popular and the renovated Wal-Mart got a new shade of blue that Wal-Mart loved so much in the 1990s and even had a McDonald's inside, and of course, both still kept up with renovations and operate today.


Kmart, shortly after closing. Ferreri's Italian is in the upper right.

The closure of Kmart left nearly 83,000 square feet open. By the end of the year, however, Tractor Supply Co. moved in the far left part of the store (or the southern part, for those thinking geographically) and remodeled the interior and exterior (the exterior being the metal siding TSC is known for) but only for that part of the store. The TSC took over the garden center part of the store and was rebadged as 2704 Texas Avenue, as most of the former Kmart was still vacant.

In 1996, Big Lots opened in the center of the former store (taking the main facade) and Dollar General (cutting into the ridged '70s concrete Kmart was known for) opened in the remaining space. Big Lots took the 2700 address and I believe Dollar General did too (though I'd have to look at my phone books to confirm that). Dollar General only lasted a few years before giving way to Goodwill (though it ran a store at Longmire and Harvey Mitchell for a few years as well), and around 2001, a discount grocery store concept called "YES!Less" featuring a rather obnoxious-looking anthropomorphic exclamation mark filled in the vacant Kmart Foods/Lewis & Coker/Piggly Wiggly (and ironically, this was operated by Fleming Cos., which was Kmart's main food provider at the time). The former Kmart and its adjoining stores were finally full. There's not a lot of pictures of Yes!Less out there, but you can see a picture at my Waco - Valley Mills page at Carbon-izer.

In 2003, Fleming went bankrupt and everything went on the sale block including YES!Less. The leases of YES!Less were acquired by and reopened under California-based Grocery Outlet. The media reported them as being called "Grocery Outlet Bargains Only" which was their logo at the time. Unfortunately, Grocery Outlet had a hard time turning around the wildly outdated stores that YES!Less had left behind. Save-a-Lot bought much of Grocery Outlet's Texas stores in fall 2004 and reopened them AGAIN if ever so briefly, and I'm sure it was gone by spring 2005. Meanwhile, Big Lots closed around 2005 during a round of closures, and despite the continued operations of Goodwill and Tractor Supply Company, it once again started to look like it had been a decade prior when Kmart closed.

In 2006, the entire shopping center was given a major exterior facelift (though was never able to get rid of the Kmart concrete ridges), three new tenants were signed on, and it was renamed as "College Station Shopping Plaza". BCS Asian Market (also known as BCS Food Market) came around this time to the old Grocery Outlet (with 2704 Texas Avenue #4 as the address), a stand-alone AutoZone was built in the parking lot next to Taste of China (2706 Texas Avenue), and U-Rent-It (2704 Texas Avenue #5) built on the side of the building and using cinderblocks instead. The parking lot lights are also original. The big change was that the stores were ALL renumbered as 2704 (this probably means Goodwill, now 2704 #3, was changed, since Goodwill opened while Big Lots was still extant).

U-Rent-It closed in 2008, and was eventually replaced in 2010 by "The Everything Backyard Store", which renamed to Champion Pools & Patios² before relocating in 2012 to the College Station Business Center just west of the center until it eventually disappeared. It was renovated in 2015 for Impact Church, and became CSL Plasma in 2016.

Big Lots remained vacant, however. but returned to College Station in 2009 when it occupied an old Goody's further north. In spring 2014, it was finally filled with Vista College (training in things like HVAC, so no Blinn competition here). Vista College also replaced a rusting roadside sign that used to be where the Kmart sign was.



The 2006 redo effectively deleted the 2700 address for years until a new building (archived from this page) was built next to AutoZone around late 2017, which was labeled 2700, but remained vacant for years afterwards. Vista College Vista College abruptly closed in 2021, and is still vacant...but in March, the "new" 2700 was filled with Fiiz Drinks, opened March 2026.

UPDATE 03-15-2026: Rewrite to incorporate update from September 2025 and to add Fiiz Drinks, as well as adding footnotes like in newer posts. Previous updates from 2021 through 2025 archived. Before this revision, a paragraph at the top stated "This post originally went up in June 1, 2010 and has been added and edited to over the years and last received a rewrite in 2014 before the current rewrite in 2021.".
1. Just a year or so earlier, it would've been branded as "Kmart Foods". These "Kmart Foods" stores weren't owned by Kmart, but rather a regional grocer. Lewis & Coker operated the Houston-area stores, but this wasn't the case in the rest of the nation. Allied Supermarkets I know operated the Michigan-area stores, and at least one Kmart Foods in the northern part of the state was operated by Winn-Dixie. This was a common practice in discounters at the time. Target Foods in Houston in the 1970s was operated by Weingarten, and Rice did the food department for Globe.
2. This was the same business, but their Facebook page which indicated as such has long since disappeared.

Greens Prairie Road and William D. Fitch Parkway

This page has moved off-site. See you at Carbon-izer!

Koppe Bridge Bar & Grill

While the trees have definitely grown over the years, it's not quite as leafy and secluded as this picture appears. (Picture by author, June 2019)
One of the most popular pages on the blog used to be a page on Koppe Bridge, the actual Koppe Bridge of which I attached an image from Project HOLD of the bridge from the 1960s. Sadly, as Google SEO rules everything, the page that comes up for searches of that type comes up with this page and not my own page. They talk about Batt's Ferry too, that's where the "modern" photos are from.

The bridge in the 1960s, already condemned. Presumably, the bridge was not repaired or rebuilt as it was not worth it to repair, with what was called Jones Bridge Road (FM 60) being a better route in and out of Brazos County, rather into a network of unimproved roads and no direct access to modern-day Wellborn Road. The timbers were dismantled, and despite Google Maps STILL mislabeling Hopes Creek Road as going out to the river and not Koppe Bridge Road going out to the river all these years later, the bridge only has some pilings left that are barely identifiable on Google Earth today.

Once the old Koppe Bridge post dropped out of the top ten posts, I felt that I could convert the page into a format that the rest of the blog uses, on buildings and businesses, of course. Before I settled on that, one of the features that I wanted to cover in the blog fairly early on when I had little idea of what I really wanted to cover were a series of posts entitled "The Wellborn Way" in which I would describe Wellborn Road as going through it in the late 1990s, with all the changes that encompassed it. One of the eventual posts that came out of that mess included the original Chevron in Wellborn and Veronica's Country Corner.

The Wellborn Road as I remember it was pretty empty all the way from Rock Prairie to Wellborn, with little things that disappeared over the years, such as a small shed at Deacon and Wellborn (with a roof turbine) and a series of telegraph poles that ran from the FM 2818 intersection beyond (these were removed around 1999-2000, shortly before the Rock Prairie crossing was built), and there was Koppe Bridge, located at the corner of Sallie Lane and Wellborn Road.

Over time, small expansions to the building and parking lot were done, with the back parking lot done shortly after the widening of Wellborn Road took out more parking. When Wellborn Road was reconstructed as a divided six-lane road by 2011, it disallowed left turns in and out of Sallie Lane and the Koppe Bridge parking lot.

Balcones Drive was built sprouting off of Wellborn (it did not connect to Balcones Drive off of Welsh), and Sallie Lane was deleted entirely. The mobile home directly behind Koppe Bridge, I remember had an address of 2799 Sallie Lane, but after Balcones was built that whole property became 200 Balcones. The entrance from Sallie Lane to Wellborn was cut off, part of it became a section of Koppe Bridge's parking lot and the rest became a new driveway off of Balcones.

Koppe Bridge's website claims that the building was "originally an old feed store that we converted into our restaurant" and "some of the original timbers in the floor at the Wellborn Road location are from the old Koppe Bridge that spanned the Brazos River until the late 1920's when it was eventually destroyed by flood waters".

Well, the bridge was not destroyed in the late 1920s, it was in the 1960s...but the building actually isn't that old. Brazos CAD has the building being built in 1987 (it wasn't in early 1980s aerials), which begs the question of how long those timbers were sitting in storage before being used for the building...if it's even true at all. From 1988 to the very early 1990s it was TomPac Feed & Supply.

As their website states, Koppe Bridge opened in October 1992, with other additions completed later over time in the style of the original building (the oldest part is the dining room between the main doors and the ordering counters), but despite the deceptive age the building, it certainly feels a bit out of place with the modern Jones Crossing. Most of the parking lot is still unpaved (grandfathered in) and at some point the residence(s) behind it will be torn down for commercial development.

UPDATE 4/30/2021: Completely revamped the entire page to focus on the restaurant. Also changed the date from January 2, 2011 to January 3, 2011 to avoid conflict with an article on LoTrak.

[Side Stories] LoTrak

Updated on June 28, 2013, with the correct spelling of the word, also renamed from "LoTrack: What Little We Know"

Being in College Station, I can say that The Eagle keeps the worst archives of newspapers around.

One of the more interesting things I heard I've heard about the history of the city was the circa-1993 proposal of "LoTrak" officially) was a way to avoid railroad crossings along Wellborn Road.

The main reason is that both College Station voters didn't want to do it (or was it Texas A&M?) even though TxDOT, the county, and Bryan would do it (it would cost millions, as seen above).

The original plan (seen above) was a sunken trench that would basically allow trains to descend about 25 feet below street level around Southwest Parkway, and convert Wellborn Road to a divided highway. What's bizarre is that Villa Maria Road and FM 2818 (it was FM 2818 back then!) as railroad crossings, which ironically are the only ones today that have replaced their at-grade crossings with overpasses or underpasses since the LoTrak proposal.

I've heard some earlier conflicting stories about this (source and other source), as some have claimed that it would go past 2818, or be partially elevated (possibly around University, maybe, which already had an overpass)

Later the possibility came up of rerouting the railroad to the west (that I remember) around 2001. That was even more difficult to imagine. First off, had they done that, my best friend would've moved out of town (he had lived in River Run). Furthermore, I couldn't imagine (and still can't, frankly) the railroad being abandoned along Wellborn. That would leave a lifeless right-of-way along Wellborn, bumping over patched crossings and seeing nothing but a scarred grass path, which would eventually give way to a full highway.


Updated to 2013 Format 5/15