Fazoli's at Harvey Road

Apologies for the lower-res than normal picture, it was taken from Connecting Point's parking lot.
From the parking lot of Connecting Point Church or OfficeMax, depending on what year it is, we come across the Fazoli's restaurant at 400 Harvey Road. Fazoli's is actually one of those chain restaurants that the Houston area doesn't have anymore (or Dallas for that matter), and the College Station location is just one of 15 restaurants as of this writing, scattered across Texas with no more than one per city (except Waco, which has two).

BCAD says that Fazoli's was built in 2001, a few years after the OfficeMax was built. It's been years since I went to Fazoli's, but from what I remember, the food really wasn't worth writing home about. The menu emphasized pasta, but for things like spaghetti and meatballs, you could make that at home fairly easily, and even things like the breadsticks (which were rather salty) have frozen-food equivalents. I don't remember there being anything that I ordered there that's rather difficult to craft at home (like, say, a steak or french fries). That's at least how I remember it, maybe it's changed since then, but this isn't a food review blog, that's what Yelp is for.

This picture and above was taken by the author, October 2019.

In the next post, we'll continue the new Harvey Road series, with a quick look across the street...

Connecting Point Church / Former OfficeMax

Reusing the big box.

To break out of the recent hiatus, I had to think of a splashy new idea, and not just some random photo of a small commercial building (it would have been quite easy to just post a photo of the Southwest Parkway Wendy's and call it a day). I had started writing on the Westinghouse plant/The Science Park/Providence Park but I still didn't have photos for it.

Rather, I was walking around today in the Harvey Road area, and it hit me. Why don't I make a series on Harvey Road? Not on the road itself, although I've done that in the past, but rather some of the things along it. Previous posts on Harvey Road as of this writing include Former Circuit City, Post Oak Square, and the building which is now Fuddruckers.

The first building is one at 410 Harvey Road, which opened around 1997 (possibly 1998—very difficult as I only have some construction-related documents and nothing on grand openings) as an OfficeMax superstore, with all of OfficeMax's "store-within-a-store" features at the time, like FurnitureMax (office furniture) and CopyMax (print-for-pay services). The new OfficeMax also included space for a small fast food restaurant in front of it (later developed as Fazoli's), and a new access road, a stubbed-out George Bush Drive East road that ended before crossing Wolf Pen Creek.

I never went to OfficeMax all that often, probably collectively less than a half a dozen times before it closed in early 2012 and moved to a smaller location at Central Station and later closed. Within a few years, the building began hosting Connecting Point Church, which later renovated the building (not much, really) and put up permanent signage on the building.

The church's foyer area and entrance to the coffee shop.

As the church is fairly small, there are two sub-tenants inside, both of which connect to the church foyer proper, The Brew Coffeehouse, open from 7am to midnight daily (except for Friday and Saturday, when it closes at 11), and Aggieland Pregnancy Outreach.

The back corridor with the restrooms hasn't changed much since the OfficeMax days.

Editor's Note: Next post will be a short post on Fazoli's, and about six other landmarks on Harvey Road will be covered by this series before the new Post Oak Mall post, and then I'll segue into/tease the next series, which will be the new idea for posts going forward, rather than a random grab bag of what I've collected recently. All pictures in this post were taken by the author, October 2019.

Texaco, Longmire Drive

Picture by author, September 2019
One more story before a major rewrite of the post on the College Station Walmart is done, the gas station on the corner of Longmire and FM 2818, southeast corner. Originally addressed as 1600 FM 2818 before becoming 2201 Longmire Drive, the gas station opened after Walmart but before Albertsons, opening around 1989 as perhaps the last "original" Circle K store to be built in the area. By the time Circle K left the area in 1999 and sold the stores to Duke & Long as mentioned in the post on Circle K Truxtop, the Circle K stores in Houston were long gone, having sold those to National Convenience Stores, which rebranded them as Stop N Go, which ultimately turned out to be a fortuitous move as whatever was left of those stores plus new ones were re-taken by Circle K within the last year as of this writing.

As for this store, the name eventually gave way to "Handi Stop" after Everyday, with the Conoco trading in its name for Diamond Shamrock (the last prototype with an italicized logo) in the early 2000s and Texaco taking command in the late 2000s as new owner Valero discontinued the Diamond Shamrock name, a move surely not unnoticed by the former "Sevcik's Texaco" across the street.

Antonio's Pizza by the Slice

Picture from summer 2013.
In the most recent update of this post (November 10th, 2021) we have learned that the subject of the post (split off from this page), Antonio's Pizza by the Slice, closed in very early November 2021 after a run of just short of 18 years, originally opening around November 2003.

Interestingly, Antonio's was actually a branch of an East Coast pizza chain with no locations in New York, but in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and, until very recently, College Station, Texas.

Back when Antonio's opened, College Main was a normal road with sidewalks, bike lanes, and two functional traffic lanes. That was until College Station decided to turn their half of College Main into a pedestrian mall (the closure happened in summer 2012) while the Bryan side of College Main was made into an attractive roadway with nice lighting, concrete, and bike lanes. The "new" College Main is a charmless void, without even a single tree and basically serves as another bar-hopping plaza like the main Northgate Promenade.

While the building is estimated to date back to 1930, records are spotty. It was Court's University Shoe Repair from until 1979 to the end of 1984. Lacey's (jewelry store) occupied half of the storefront from late 1994 to early 1996, and split the space with Perfect Tan III. Perfect Tan seems to have given way to Software Exchange, which was here from fall 1994 to the end of 1995 and became Byte Me Computers from January 1996 to April 1997, Cycles Etc. from July 1998 to summer 2003 (Cycles Etc. appeared to have occupied the full space). A 1990 planning document also mentions a proposed Thundercloud Subs in the space, but I'm not sure it ever opened. It did however, open next to Albertsons and at 607 University Drive East.

Like many a student, it was Antonio's at my time at A&M, fairly inexpensive (at least prior to 2014), decent-tasting pizza with large slices and, unlike what many of the campus establishments had, Coca-Cola products. Due to varying experiences with the food over the years, I can't really say anything particularly good or bad about it.

UPDATE 11-09-2021: Rewrote entry with better overview of former tenants, and of course, covering the closure of the restaurant ([defunct] label added).
UPDATE 04-02-2022: Added date back to the pedestrian mall as part of reworking original "104-115 College Main" page.
UPDATE 01-13-2023: Dollar Slice Club, a new pizza restaurant, opened in April 2022. [defunct] tag has been removed.
UPDATE 04-26-2024: Cycles Etc. has posted a picture of when they were located here on Facebook. (I have this picture backed up so let me know if it goes down).