Showing posts with label newspaper article. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newspaper article. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Loupot's Southgate

From The Eagle, August 12, 1988

As a complement to their Northgate location, then-locally based Loupot's built a second store here in August 1988. Like their Northgate location, however, the store closed in spring 2012. Sometime afterwards, Maroon & White, LP moved in, better known as TexAgs. (Their film subsidiary, Texas Filmworks, was in the building before moving out to the old Chevron, where you can also see a picture of the building). TexAgs owns MyBCS, a popular Bryan-College Station forum that they ended up fully integrating into their main site. (I will refrain from discussions regarding TexAgs directly, though I will comment that the moderation team takes the rather pretentious term of "Staff" despite almost certainly being a volunteer position).

There also used to be a barbershop accessible on the upper level (Southgate Barbers) but I think that moved out by the time TexAgs moved in.

The article above mentions a Quicker Sticker, but it wasn't there for very long (it first opened off Cavitt Street in 1984) and I don't see anything on old aerials. Did they operate out of the then-Gulf's garage...?

EDITOR'S NOTE: A major re-do was done to Westgate Center's article. Authentic coastline atmospheres, salsa-saturated sandwiches, and Blimpie's second run, it's all here on the new page! Don't forget to check out that Ko-fi link. If we raise $100 I'll make the Defunct Business List, a list of every store and restaurant covered in this blog with a link back to its appropriate post.

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Weiner's Bryan

From July 9, 1972. The "North Bryan Shopping Center" was never built; Weiner's was besides itself.

As part of a bigger project that is involving breaking down/updating the Texas Avenue page on my other website, Carbon-izer as well as adding some much-needed Bryan entries to the site, comes another entry, Weiner's, at 1520 N. Texas Avenue. We briefly mentioned Weiner's in the Culpepper Plaza page, but the Houston-based discount apparel store existed from 1972 to the chain's bankruptcy in 2001, with not even Weinerman able to save the store chain from its demise.

Best Pawn quickly picked it up and opened in 2002. By that time, there was more commercial development in the area, with H-E-B Pantry catty-corner (well, hidden behind on Old Hearne Road anyway) and the AppleTree-anchored Culpepper North. Best Pawn also had a long run (not quite as long as Weiner's) and operated until September 1, 2021. After a full renovation of the building, Poco Loco Supermercado opened in July 2023, though it doesn't have a fuel station component.

Monday, March 3, 2025

Texas Hall of Fame

I have no color pictures of the Texas Hall of Fame so here's some 1978 ads instead.

As I mentioned for what is now the post covering Foxhole Lounge, there used to be a whole post called "Stories of the West Loop" which was developed into other posts on this blog. That post also talked about the areas "beyond the border", the places where while they weren't technically far away from home, they were enough out of the way that I never saw them unless I was going on a bigger trip. Texas Hall of Fame, was of course, one of them.

Seeing as how most of the College Station-focused FM 2818 posts have been developed in some form or fashion, there needs to be more on Bryan specifically (and while Bryan content has increased in recent years--of the 110 posts from the 1/1/2020 post of O'Reilly Auto Parts Texas Avenue, College Station and 3/1/25's On the Border, nearly a third of them have been in Bryan, and I expect the trend to continue.

Most of what I could say about Texas Hall of Fame, the warehouse-like building that sat here since September 1978 and was another sight off of FM 2818/Harvey Mitchell Parkway when traveling that direction was written by The Eagle in 2003. If you still deign to give The Eagle your money you can see at the top of the page here. But I don't like broken pages and pop-ups, and neither should you, so here are the scans reproduced below.
This page is large. Click to see full size.

Johnny Lyon, the sole owner of the club at the time, kept his promise—he kept the Hall alive as long as he lived....but in November 2010, Lyon passed away at the age of 73.

New ownership kept the Hall open for another year but in late December 2011, the Hall cancelled their New Years Eve events and closed permanently. The loss of the area's biggest (and most inclusive—the other dance halls catered exclusively to college students) was a mournful one, and the dance hall did not reopen (nor did a similar project announced in early 2012, the "College Station Hall of Fame", which was to be built somewhere in south College Station).

Soon afterwards, the site was redeveloped for Rudder's Landing, a new Walmart-anchored power center that would add mostly fast food to West Bryan (rather than just the McDonald's there at the southwest corner) though the actual site of the dance hall has never been redeveloped itself, at least for now.

According to the most recent PDF (archived from here), the second phase of Rudder's Landing will not only incorporate the old Texas Hall of Fame space but Bryan Mobile Truck & Trailer Repair (at 683 North Harvey Mitchell Pkwy., former home of Bryan's Central Freight Lines terminal) would be torn down for Atwoods.

Finally, I should mention that the address of the Hall of Fame was 649 N. Harvey Mitchell Pkwy., though this name was only bestowed after FM 2818 got a real name, prior to this, it didn't HAVE an address. As of the June 2026 update, this page no longer hosts additional information on Rudder's Landing, but I figured that it really wasn't a direct replacement and instead I've added it to an updated version of Carbon-izer's FM 2818 page effective 7/1/2026.

UPDATE 06-26-2026: Removed Rudder's Landing information (including associated tags...[villa maria], [2010s], [car wash], [chick-fil-a], [discount stores], [Subway], [Walmart]) in favor of the FM 2818 page. It will go live July 1, 2026. As a result this post has been renamed to "Texas Hall of Fame" from "Texas Hall of Fame and Rudder's Landing".