This place in Bryan-College Station is best remembered (at least to me) as Gattiland, but the history of the building goes farther beyond that, and we'll start there instead.
There were plenty of discount stores and similar operation in the 1960s and 1970s, most of which were bankrupt by the mid-1980s (if not earlier) and part of the problem was that they were scattered across the country with no real distribution system in place. Naturally, Bryan would be the home to a few of these doomed ventures including Cook's and Ardan Catalog Showroom. Despite being the fourth-largest in the country in 1979, there isn't much information on it. Even Google brings up this very page as the first result. Based out of Des Moines, there were about ten stores in Texas though none in big markets. No stores in Houston, just Bryan, Beaumont, and Galveston. The whole chain went under in 1986, and by that time Service Merchandise had taken over Wilson's and was firmly in a bunch of markets.
While Ardan was designed to have additional smaller stores, mostly on the Kent Street side of the center, the closure allowed the main space to be subdivided, and this is when longtime tenants like Brazos CAD (which was there until the late 2010s) to move in, and Ardan's old space was whittled down to around 18k square feet. Rolling Thunder, a skating rink (roller, not ice) moved in by August 1989, with the name of the shopping center changed to Travis Landing around this time (you can see a picture of the plaza here from c. 1989, though the tenant listing is newer). In 1994, however, Rolling Thunder was sold. Rather than new ownership reopening the rink (it closed in May 1994), everything was dismantled and moved to Wolf Pen Bowl & Skate where it would remain for at least another decade.
On May 1st, 1996, Gattiland opened (see the Mr. Gatti's on Northgate post. While at one point Mr. Gatti's operated a location not too far away from the Briarcrest location, this gave Bryan a new Mr. Gatti's location (I'm not sure how it was signed, if it was "Mr. Gatti's Gattiland" or whatever, but it was definitely colloquially known as Gattiland), and was the place to have fun/birthday parties/etc. (as Pooh's Park was dead and gone by this time, leaving little but the sign...and Putt-Putt was a bit of a joke even in its prime) for anyone growing up in College Station between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Oh yes, it was definitely something: there was a large buffet and a regular eating area, the party rooms, a large room that showed Cartoon Network on a projection TV (remember, this was Cartoon Network of the late 1990s, which is still spoken of very highly), and the "Midway", which had the prize booth right as you went in. To the back was the bumper cars and a huge McDonald's Playplace-type playground, only larger (with one of those things you could grab and push off and it would slide down the metal rail: I don't know what it's called). There was also air hockey and tons of games, both redemption type games and arcade games (including several linked Daytona USA arcades). Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of the inside but I can remember most of it on the inside and could probably describe parts of it to you if asked nicely (it was the purple bumper car that was put in storage in the later years, for example).
Well, it got really run down pretty quickly, accelerated by an incident where some "unruly teenagers" released early from school damaged machines and culminated in someone going through one of the huge 10-foot windows in front of the restaurant (read the article, second page too). Some of the damaged machines never worked quite right after that and by the time it moved, the playground was dismantled as well; it was quite sad because just a few years earlier it was a premier place to be. In 2003 it moved to College Station and renamed to Gattitown (which will continue here). The building sat vacant and eventually became "Thunder Elite", a kids gymnastics/cheerleading place for a while, too, though it eventually packed up and left as well (new location).
In mid-2014, the former Gattiland/Thunder Elite space became Planet Fitness. It also gave part of the facade a purple paint job which didn't match the rest of the plaza.
So that's it for Gattiland, Ardan Catalog Showroom, and the like. Pictures are welcome, you know...
UPDATE 01-13-2023: Fixed dead links, got rid of the antiquated light blue text and other rewrites.
UPDATE 01-19-2025: Significant rewrite including the article where Gattiland lost its soul, better integration with other articles, and a lot more on when Ardan and Rolling Thunder came and went.
