As of this writing, I recently rewrote the article for "Pooh's Park, Tinsley's, and Others Replaced by a Shopping Center"with a new name and some new features, and in the process removed the little shopping center with Champion Firearms and Starbucks, planning to update the Texas Avenue page on Carbon-izer (which I've talked about before), which has a few issues I needed to fix anyway. Among adding things I came across the fact that I wanted to add something to this blog rather than the page, Burger Chef.
Burger Chef was once one of the biggest fast food hamburger chains in the nation, second only to McDonald's, and in 1969 they landed at 2301 South Texas Avenue in Bryan. Unfortunately, Burger Chef's corporate parent, General Foods, which bought it that same year, wasn't a great manager of the chain, and this particular location closed around the end of 1972.1 Burger King had also opened in the Texas Avenue corridor around this time, and it too had a short shelf life (likely stemming from problems with corporate parent Pillsbury), with McDonald's opening in the area in the early 1970s and being VERY successful since.
By 1977 Bryan Alternator Company was in the spot, and operated through 1985. The building was later used by a car dealership next door, but it hasn't been a car dealership since 2005. (Google says "BCS Family Auto Center" is here, but unless it's REALLY recent I can't find proof of it being there).
1. The chain would reach peak locations in 1973, and by 1982 had sold to Imasco, which closed and reopened most of the corporate locations to Hardee's, leaving the franchised locations to die.
