Well, it happened again, the rate of posts was completely unsustainable for the last three months (certainly not worth the effort I put into them) and I crashed out. (See Editor's Note). Today we're doing 404 University Center, with the last of the pictures I used from the summer 2014 set. The rest of the photos are below.
The center was built in 1980 and this article mentions that there were additional warehouses behind the center that were intended for tenants but I'm not sure if that's still the case now.
The problem is, without a main anchor, the center is just a bunch of little smaller tenants that have moved in and out over the years. Some of the first tenants included Conway's (moved from Downtown Bryan)1, The Loading Zone restaurant, Italian restaurant Cenare (which operated up until March 2019), Harold's (at suite A), and Kelly's Toylane (moving from Townshire), DeAngelos (a gourmet food store with wines, meats, and cheeses, similar to Ira's).
It would be difficult to go over the full history of this center when places entered and exited, but Cashion-Cane (aka Cashion-Cane/The Christmas Store) moved here in the late 1980s from 504 Harvey Road. If it was originally a year-round Christmas store it wasn't by the late 1980s, and while it had a big seasonal influence it was mostly the "gift" department featuring silver, bridal china, stationary, and collectibles (see clipping). This occupied suite D before disappearing sometime around the mid-1990s. Suite A is currently (as of 2026 and since 2011) Thorn Music Center. In the late 1990s they opened Scott & White Pharmacy here, a S&W-owned pharmacy (not much in the way of other non-medical items) before moving it to 1100 Earl Rudder Freeway next to their clinic.2 By 2000 it was already the home of Wiggles & Wags, a dog grooming boutique which later moved to Bryan.
There was a TCBY location from at least 1991 to 2005. There are other defunct tenants I dug up in trying to find stuff, there was a storefront for McCaw Cablevision in the mid-1980s3 and a locally-owned sandwich shop called Deb's Deli (owned by one Debbie Sherman), and numerous others. Current tenants (as of January 2026) include Attitude Dance Boutique (since around 2018), Chef Cao's, Anytime Fitness (replaced Cenare)4, Century 21 offices, Myra's Custom Framing (since 1991, though I believe it replaced a different framing shop), and a few others. In the future I may end up adding some smaller tenants that have come and gone over the years. Let me know (email) if you want to see more...though I may end up adding a few anyway.
1. Their old address was 103 N. Main Street, for future reference.
2. This closed around the late 2010s.
3. McCaw sold its cable business in 1987 (ultimately, it fell to Suddenlink/Optimum) in order to focus on the burgeoning cellular phone industry. AT&T ("Ma Bell") purchased a third of the company in 1992 with the rest of the company being acquired in 1994 in a huge merger, ultimately forming the foundation for the modern AT&T Mobility we know today.
4. I had somehow conflated it with 24-Hour Gyms of Texas, which existed at 700 University Drive East.
Editor's Note: Burn-out affected me hard as to why there wasn't any posts recently, especially as to how things were going—it was ALWAYS something along a major road, maybe something I covered in the past, or a gas station, or a restaurant. There was a poor feedback loop (rather discouraging for a highly local site like this—I don't expect a lot of money (but I would appreciate it) but I rarely even get nice letters from people.
More recently, I've been writing reviews about Nintendo Power issues in order. Some issues got full, multi-page features, but some just had a paragraph, if that. It got me thinking...when I removed the Texas Avenue in Bryan page I had intended to re-add everything at one time...but what am I going to do about those other ones? Do you really want to wait for a feature on Dollar General? (Rhetorical question). While I haven't incorporated the new version of Carbon-izer just yet, I intend to add stuff that I likely won't cover on this site. To help integrate this into the site while working on the next big project to show up here (yes I have an idea for it), I may end up making "hidden" posts to account for the "city directory" pages and make them easily searchable; for example, when I redo Earl Rudder Freeway, I'll add [McDonald's], [cinema], [restaurants], [churches and other houses of worship], and [Target], just as an example.
