Former Wolfe Nursery

Until I can get a real picture here, I'm just going to move the advertisement here up to the top. I don't have the original handy so I'm not sure what paper it comes from.

Today, you know this place as Cavender's Boot City, as it has been since September 2004 as per what I could find in the Eagle's archives. The first development here was a go-kart track. It was granted a permit in the late 1980s as per scans that are on this website. From my own material (phone books), this was "Post Oak Go-Carts Amusement", 609 Holleman Dr. East. In 1993, Houston-based Wolfe Nursery built a store here, but in fall 1997, it shut down (ahead of the Houston stores, which closed in spring 1998), leaving nothing more than gray lettering behind.

The story of Wolfe Nursery needs to be told at some point, the company was briefly owned by the late Pier 1 Imports, and the last stores were closed in 1999 (located in Austin). (The URL refers to "Wolf Pen Nursery", which got conflated into the name in my memory for some reason by the time this was published in the early 2010s).

The font in the front was greenish, and a more bold variant of Helvetica that was common in the 1980s. The building was tan and had green trim as well. I do remember being inside of it once. It had skylights but had a fairly empty feel (it also had different sections of the store that felt like different rooms).

After sitting vacant for most of my childhood, work began in 2004 on the long-vacant building (remarkably just over a decade old), gutting and expanding it. This became Cavender's Boot City, and replaced an old, almost hidden store off of Harvey Road from 1986.




Above, the two pictures, snagged from Google Earth, shows how much the building was reconstructed. These were in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Below is the design I drew up in early 2011 when I first posted this (I later replaced the image with the right name later).

Artist's conception

In terms of the Houston locations, here's a former one according to the old addresses, serving as a "distribution center" of sorts for Houston Garden Centers at least what I could tell from 2014 records. It looks familiar, doesn't it? The College Station location didn't have a lit sign.


The Cavender's had an address of 2300 Earl Rudder Freeway South and was supposed to be part of a bigger development, Wolf Pen Village. I remember seeing renderings of different buildings along Holleman Drive East all the way down to Dartmouth, but it was put on hold during the recession, and due to the failure of the retail/restaurant component of Lofts at Wolf Pen Creek, was never filled out anyway. Too bad...not that I really want there to be restaurants along that part (it's fine as it is!) but that we missed out on the awesome Cavender's neon signs, which is seen in some older locations but also some newer ones, ones that have opened after this one. It's also worth noting that Cavender's expanded in 2015, adding about 5,500 square feet to its existing footprint.

UPDATE 08-17-2021: After last rewrite (6/12/18), updated again with a new opening/closing date but also another minor rewrite (including a patched link). UPDATE 09-15-2021: Recently, I wrote a fairly comprehensive history of Wolfe Nursery, from its founding in Stephenville to its final end on Houston Historic Retail, a website operated by my friend Mike A., which gives a bit of breadth to the Wolfe Nursery story as alluded earlier.

Dave's Seafood & Steak / Tom's BBQ and Steakhouse

This restaurant was built sometime in the early 1980s (build date unknown due to demolished building) as Dave's Seafood & Steak Restaurant (operating from 1983 to 1985), closing as one of the restaurants that got washed out in the mid-1980s recession. Other than the ad above I have little information on it. It was briefly another restaurant (Johnny Peppy's) in late 1985 and early 1986 (it lasted for less than six months but it did open based on a mention in a Chamber of Commerce newsletter).

It later became another restaurant known as Karin's (according to The Eagle, so far, any other proof up to and including tax records has proved elusive) and in 1991, it became the College Station home of Tom's Barbecue & Steakhouse, which also changed the address from 2005 to 2001 Texas Avenue (though I believe it was the same building). Tom's Barbecue had been in town since the late 1960s and had established a new-build Bryan site just six years earlier at 3610 South College Avenue (now home to J. Cody's). While I never remember going there, it was a well-known restaurant in town and right across from the H-E-B Pantry Foods where my family regularly went grocery shopping.

Tom's Barbecue & Steakhouse began as just "Tom's Barbecue" in 1969 and moved around town a few times before settling at 3610 South College Avenue in 1985 in a newly-built location (now home to J. Cody's). The College Station restaurant officially opened in 1991, with both locations featuring a meat-based menu of steaks, burgers, barbecue, and a few others. It was also known for the "Tom's Famous Aggie Special", which gave you barbecue (your choice of meats, whether it be ribs, brisket, or whatever), a block of cheddar cheese, pickles, half an onion, bread, and served on butcher paper with a knife. The food quality, however, started to go downhill toward the end of the restaurant's lifespan, likely when pitmaster Wayne Kammerl left following new ownership in 1998. In April 2001, both restaurants abruptly closed.

Here's a menu from Project HOLD (which was supplied by me, actually). I don't know of the date, maybe late 1990s?

Originally some menu items were removed and blacked out (like the Veggie Basket), while some were added (they were stapled to the front)





There also used to be a Buffalo Wings one stapled on, and it used buffalo clip art, again.

In 2011, I found the old Tom's BBQ website (as early as the late 1990s, the College Station Tom's BBQ website disappeared and the domain was taken over by an Arizona-based Tom's BBQ). Here's the History page from it (thanks, Archive.org)


If you go to the archived website, you can see that for early 1997 and late 1996, it was a pretty advanced website: you could order online for pick-up, which wasn't common back then.

After serving for parking for the adjacent E-Z Travel Inn for a few years, it was torn down for a strip center.

- The main tenant was originally Blockbuster, which moved from 1800-B Texas Avenue South and was here from 2005 to early 2011. Following the closure, it became MattressFirm a few months later.
- Directly next to it was Rhino Video Games (also opened 2005), also owned by Blockbuster at the time though I don't think there was any interior access. Rhino was bought and absorbed by GameStop in early 2007, which was disappointing as I heard Rhino actually carried classics like Super Nintendo, which GameStop had long since scrapped by then, and didn't have GameStop's aggressive policies that made it disliked by many people.. However, Rhino didn't have much of a footprint in Texas; there were only a few other stores and all of them closed by the time it was rebranded.
- Rosie's Pho Asian Noodle, opened 2006 but closed around 2019 due to bad reviews, bad food. In 2021 Taste of Thailand opened in the spot.
- Batteries Plus opened in 2007 which eventually became Batteries+Bulbs in a corporate rebranding in the late 2000s.
There's four more suites I didn't cover--realty, nail spas, vaping, cash stores...but that's maybe for another time (if ever).

UPDATE 07-13-2021: New restaurant addition with Karin's (the restaurant added in an update a year ago) downplayed.

UPDATE 10-31-2024: A few notes were added to the current tenants.

University Square Shopping Center / Legacy Point

A still-standing reminder of what the center was. All but one was gone as of this when this photo was taken in 2012 with my old cell phone camera. The Junction pulled out in summer of 2012 and was replaced by "Piranha Fitness Studio". There's a smaller sign signed as Legacy Point closer to IHOP.

This used to be one of the more popular posts on this blog and to this day, the picture of the closed Albertsons (since demolished) is used as the Facebook header. The old Albertsons (or Skaggs Alpha Beta, or however it is remembered) is a topic in itself, which is covered at this page now.

Most of this shopping center is actually gone now, including the former Albertsons, but was composed of several buildings, which I'll try to describe going counter clockwise around the center from University to College Avenue.

Almost directly behind the Taco Bell on University was two food shacks.

For years (since approximately 1991, if I recall correctly), there was a little Cajun food place called Hebert's Cajun Food. It wasn't that cheap, but it was fast, delicious, and worth it: much like a food truck. It closed on June 15th, 2012 with more pictures (not mine) here, and later moved to a variety of locations, including Village Foods for about a year. They later built a short-lived physical location in downtown Caldwell, and the latest location is operating of the Buc-ee's in Brazoria.

There was also a coffee shop, "Java Jitters" just directly across it, which was a small shack operated by the same owners of Hebert's (the same guy ran both shacks, but obviously never simultaneously). Never went to it, it was only open in the mornings. The addresses of Hebert's and Java Jitters were 727 University Drive and 729 University Drive, respectively. You can see my pictures below.


Java Jitters, gutted.

My old compiled University Drive directory, 729 University was "Film & Photos No. 2248" in 1980 and Nachos to Go in 1993. "The wooden shack of Java Jitters was almost certainly not the photo booth. However, Java Jitters and Nachos to Go were likely the same building."

Behind these food shacks was another building, was 725 University Drive. Like the two food shacks, it is also gone. It was located approximately where the intersection of the two halves of Church Avenue meet the main driveway that dead-ends at the Stack location and faced south (behind the Taco Bell). It was torn down in July 2012.

I also took the picture (a few, actually!) of the A+ Tutoring/Fat Burger building, which had both closed after the spring 2012 semester (but before the demolition). It wasn't an unfamiliar location that semester, either, I had gone to both buildings in the semester prior: trying to pass Organic Chemistry through A+ (if you are a student or considering to be one, please do not do this, just study and know the material), or hanging out in Fat Burger (not related to a chain called Fatburger, that's different--seems it's confused Yelpers), which had a fixings bar (which is, of course, best at the beginning of the day). It lived up to its name--offering the 1/3 pound "Fat Burger" and the full-pound Bevo Burger. The fixings bar I don't have a picture of, only the gutted remains of it after the store closed. Seems like they also may have had a different logo at one time.

Neither tenant was original, Fat Burger's "goodbye" sign implies it was there since 1984, and from my notes, "Mo-Peds to Go", then "Tommy's" was at Fat Burger's site (suite A) and for suite B (A+), there was Budget Tapes & Records, which was a popular music chain at the time, then Music Express until around the mid-1980s.

I didn't take the front of A+, nor Fat Burger at night, unfortunately (Fat Burger kind of had this half-burned out light, and A+ didn't light up at all). There was a picnic bench in front of both buildings. I know I remember (maybe circa 2003) that A+ actually had the "AT+" logo on the front, but it still must have ran afoul of TAMU logo usage. A 1995 directory refers to the spot as "A&M Tutoring" (the university cracked down on unlicensed use of "A&M" or "Aggie" in business names, but it's not clear if they had already changed their sign by that time).


On the side of the building, the original logo could still be seen. They offered CHEM 227 and CHEM 228, just not at the time they painted this.


Never thought to get Fat Burger delivered.



The front of the building, taken in daytime by a cell phone camera.

This location is gone, too, with both locations consolidating near the old Albertsons/Randalls.

Right to the east of that was the main shopping center, which is now "The Stack Field" (just open space). The Albertsons was the largest tenant at the center, closed at the end of 1997, following the purchase of the Randalls store on University Drive East. While Albertsons drew up plans to reopen the store (again, covered on the post dedicated to the store itself), it fell apart a few years later when Albertsons closed down the Houston division of the company (the local stores were moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth division) and scrapped much of its expansion plans.

As early as 2003 (presumably when the Albertsons deal was completely dead), the city was looking to improve on the center (which had lost Albertsons by that point) as part of a largely far-fetched Northgate redevelopment that would see University Square (eventually) get developed into something else: a "Cultural/Science Center" anchor, citing the Exploratorium as a model (and THIS I did hear about back in '03), a think tank/business incubator, or a mixed-use project that would incorporate a variety of restaurants and a modern movie theater. This all would all change, of course, when it was revealed that the center would be dramatically altered for a new mixed-use development, but ultimately all that resulted was a new development behind it, and some demolished buildings, most of which haven't been replaced since they were torn down. Even now, only a sad-looking "Legacy Point" sign stands near the IHOP that used to be the sign of Albertsons long ago. Some "legacy". The current plan as of 2019 is supposed to replace the remainder of the shopping center with a Century Square-like development. We'll see.

It should be noted that University Square was always the name of the shopping center, not Skaggs Shopping Center as some publications have suggested.

With 301 College already covered, going down the center has these tenants.

303 College Avenue

Photo from an old yearbook.
Mitchells "department store" was a clothing store previously owned by (at least a majority of) Leonard Brothers of Fort Worth, which had been acquired in 1967 by Tandy Corporation, with a location at University Square in the early 1970s. By 1974, Tandy had disposed of the chain along with Leonard's (which was sold to Dillard's), but Mitchells continued to operate at University Square until around 1976. In 1977, Webster's Catalog Showroom opened in the spot. While this ad lists it as 306 College (for some reason), both Mitchells (per ads) and Webster's (per a 1980 phone book) had it as 303 College Avenue.


Mitchells "department store" was a clothing store previously owned by (at least a majority of) Leonard Brothers of Fort Worth, which had been acquired in 1967 by Tandy Corporation, with a location at University Square in the early 1970s. By 1974, Tandy had disposed of the chain along with Leonard's (which was sold to Dillard's), but Mitchells continued to operate at University Square until around 1976. In 1977, Webster's Catalog Showroom opened in the spot. While this ad lists it as 306 College, both Mitchells (per ads) and Webster's (per a 1980 phone book) had it as 303 College Avenue.

Notice the Tandy Corporation logo--that was RadioShack's parent company (which later adopted the name of RadioShack). They had a much greater range in those days, and ran full companies. By 1992, the store became a McDuff Superstore (according to a 1992 ad that I have), also at the address and owned by Tandy. Someone mentioned that there was a RadioShack here at one time, which may have been when Tandy ended the brand name, but I don't have confirmation of RadioShack's presence at University Square. Somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, it became Rother's, which would remain (save for a rename to Traditions) until its demise.

Next to it was BCS Bicycles (at 309 University), which moved to 317 University. Even by 1980, it was Hancock Fabrics until sometime in the late 2000s or the early 2010s, then BCS Bicycles. Probably due to the fact that both the size of the Mitchells/Webster's/Rother's/Traditions and Hancock Fabrics/BCS Bicycles, there wasn't a 305 or 307 University, even looking through archives.

The last stores on the block are a little harder to track because of various expansions of Hurricane Harry's (313 College), which dates back to at least 1992. The other side of the shopping center has a slightly taller roof. This used to be the Cineplex (later Plitt) III, a three-screen movie theater. It lasted through the various names of the supermarket, but closed around 1996 and was divided between an expansion of Hurricane Harry's, and well before the theater closed, it also shared the address with what was once simply "The Jewelry & Coin Exchange" (now "David's Jewelry & Coin Exchange" since late 2013). The last tenant on the end (315 College, taking half of the theater) was TJ's Laser Tag, which was around from maybe 1996 to 1999. I remember my brother had gone there a few times for his birthday, but I was still in elementary school when it closed.

That spot later became The Junction (a pool hall that didn't serve alcohol). The Junction eventually closed around 2012 and became Piranha Fitness Studio. There was also additional A+ classrooms at 311A College Avenue, but they're gone (now offices for Eccell Group). At one time, 313C (unknown what's there now, but the building is still there) was a restaurant called "Fred's For Lunch" which sold submarine sandwiches and Blue Bell ice cream.

Speaking of hurricanes, the restaurant in the east side of the parking lot was Crazy Cajuns', created by Hurricane Rita evacuees (Lake Charles, Louisiana) and was on its second location, moving from 14841 FM 2154 (indeed, the sign on the building side still read "Wellborn, Texas" up until its closure). While I first went to the location in Wellborn (I don't know what's there now), which included only a large covered area with picnic tables (December 2006 is when I went), this eventually did end up being a favorite of mine, as I went in March 2011 to this location and had a blast. Lots of food for a good price. It was still spicy, and had been in this place since somewhere about 2008-2009. It went through a few changes in ownership, and steadily declined, notably in service first, then food, and health ratings, before finally closing for good in summer 2012. It shut down the same week as Hebert's did (sad time for Cajun food lovers). I expressed some hope that Hebert's would be able to move into the restaurant, and go from essentially a snack bar to a full restaurant where you could take your family, but that wasn't going to work.

There used to be a Thai place before it (the second incarnation of Thai Taste, and not a particularly great one), and before that a combo Mexican/Cajun place called Alicia's (thanks to HAIF user "keyser" for the restaurant history). The comments tell a bit more of the story. In fact, while wandering around around the 2012-2013 holidays, I found the canopy had some older names exposed...


Alicia's AND Thai Taste!
It started out as a Bonanza Steakhouse in 1973 (or 1972), which was more a cafeteria/buffet affair (rather than a traditional "steakhouse") and later served briefly as Cow Hop (before it moved back to the main strip on Northgate). But in 2013, nearly 40 years after its construction, it now serves as BCS Bicycles & Repair, which moved from their location in the strip.

Other shots, taken January 2011 & surrounding buildings...





Regrettably, I was never able to get a picture of the interior of the Albertsons, or any other time: the windows were painted over, and my one shot of the interiors was kind of messed up by the flash, and while it did capture some of the interior in a blurry configuration that revealed rows of fluorescents and columns, it mostly created a reflection of me, which I didn't like.


The next shot is one that's not mine, but it's a great shot, with the old Hancock Fabrics sign visible. The second and third show older tenants, like Rother's and Hancock Fabrics. These were taken in May 2012 by me. I guess the businesses didn't bother changing the signs in the rear...





You'll notice that I forgot to mention the IHOP, which is part of the center. I don't have pictures of it, nor have been inside for over two decades.

Most recently updated in February 2020.

Walmart College Station

Walmart as it is today, during a soggy day in May 2019

When this post was originally published in January 2011, it was already a few years old based after an even older post from my old blog, Two Way Roads, so shortly after the old version of this post went "under the knife" to be revitalized for a September 2019 rewrite, parts of it are almost 10 years old. As it was written so long ago, it takes on a distinctly different approach than more modern posts.

By the time I actually did get around to rewriting it, nearly every restaurant, retail, and other place in my youthful days in College Station has been covered, excluding parks, churches, and schools. I've been familiar with the Walmart at 1815 Brothers Boulevard, store #1150 since the mid-1990s. I remember when it expanded from its original 1988 footprint (when the storefront was colored brown--but not much more than that). I remember when blue-vested employees handed out smiley face stickers and there was a lot more American goods there than today. I remember when my family started going here more often because the Kmart across the street closed.


Albertsons and Walmart back in 1995. Notice the Walmart completing its first expansion.
Many of the photos seen below are from the 2009-2010 renovation, which seemed exciting at the time and allowed me to better document the 1995-era store as I remembered it. One of my old cell phone pictures below is a map of the emergency evacuation plan, which is a floorplan of the store. It's old because "Radio Grill" was written over McDonald's, and by that time, Radio Grill was long gone.

Floorplan of the store as it appeared pre-renovation
Using the above map as a guide I'll try to walk through the original store. On the immediate right when walking in was the One-Hour Photo booth, a full photo/camera department that could develop film as well as camera and film sales, including the ever-popular disposal camera, you bought one (usually a color like green), you used it up, you returned it to the store and got the photos back. Customer Service was after that. Customer Service had restrooms (admittedly pretty dirty, but remember the "hand" shaped water fountains? I overlaid my hand on them as I pushed them, but eventually they just switched to the regular "PUSH" buttons). I remember they had atlases there, and even at one time, a Daytona USA arcade machine!

The next space over was the new restaurant, initially open as a McDonald's restaurant. This is where the store really opened up. If you looked from McDonald's you could see the checkouts and the way down to the garden area. The McDonald's looked like any McDonald's of the time, complete with a bench with Ronald sitting there. Ronald was a great photo-op (you could sit next to him) but sometime later they removed the bench and replaced him with a creepy (and not at all affable) statue of Ronald standing up. Monster Ronald disappeared when McDonald's closed sometime around 1999. It was replaced with Radio Grill, a vaguely-1950s themed snack bar with greasy hamburgers and hot dogs. While some may liberally toss the "greasy food" label around, Radio Grill was nothing more than that. And forgettable greasy food, since I don't remember much about it. This lasted until 2006, when it was torn out for Subway. Subway was a bit different, featuring a false brick facade, and instead the food in the back, the serving line was on the north side of the area rather than the back.

Directly behind the restaurant was where a lot of the A&M merchandise (shirts, etc.) were kept, with the area nearest the men's section, which had a huge row of jeans.

Along the back wall, there were large pictures that were awfully dated by the late 2000s, one had a family eating watermelon, two boys laughing, a drawing of a moon with some 1990s script lettering. The boys section was where I got most of my clothes (my mother bought them, anyway) growing up, and the jewelry was the place where I got a few of my watches. The dressing room was located in the middle of the women's clothing: a shoddy operation, with only five dressing rooms and only one mens room.

The electronics section was largely a "pen" in the middle of the store, kept that way so they could check out items (as they were high-price). Originally, games were on the left, videos on the right. The games had a scanner system so you could scan a bar code and watch a video of the game on overhead TVs. By 2004, it mostly not working, as was the terrible GBC model they had bolted in to the wall (the right button on the D-pad was completely screwed up by 2001). I remember this because one time I had stayed behind in the electronics section to play The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages. The right button on the D-pad became the least of my concerns when my dad found me...

In 2005, they rearranged the department, so that from left to right (you entered from the right, so it was left to right in your perspective): computer peripherals, DVDs, music, video games, iPods, AV equipment. The electronics section really was a nasty place, as it was cramped and was run-down due to negligent parents using the electronics department as a day care. Early yet random memories include a floor-to-ceiling stack of N64s and either a stand-up Donkey Kong 64 or Pokémon Snap display. Or both. I think the original electronics section became the pharmacy later: our family's now-defunct Performa 550 came from this Wal-Mart, but I don't remember it being the modern electronics section.

The shoe department was another large department with slanted mirrors, and when my siblings and I were kids, we would try to "roll" down the floor as it appeared that the floor was slanted. (Nowadays I can't even imagine touching the floor of Walmart, but it was a different store back then, like not perpetually crowded.)

The hardware section I seem to remember had fans overhanging the section, at least in the beginning. There was also a paint chip (with the paper color strips) center which I remember being abandoned out in the rain (complete with all the old strips) after the renovation happened.

Fabrics was absolutely massive as a department, and had all the thread, rugs, creepy dolls that you can paint, and wax fruit you could ever need. It wasn't as big as Hobby Lobby, but had all the basics (including a particular flowery smell). The actual fabric cutting table was very long and had at least two people and a line. Nowadays the fabric cutting table is just an aisle endcap, and you'd be lucky to see one person there. Additionally, the spray paint section had a vandalized section that was used as "testing". I submitted the photo to Cheezburger when it was still relevant but I don't think they ever posted it officially on Fail Blog, which I still regularly visited when I took this round of photos.

No big memories on toys. I bought a Pokémon board game here and some Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars, but that was long ago (to put it in perspective, I used to get said little cars at Kmart). I don't really have a lot of toy memories: the KB Toys and Toys R Us were both far away from home, and I never went to either. Most prominent section was the bicycles, which ran down the corridor to the Garden Center.

The indoor garden center portion was strongly smelled of chemicals, but that was where we got the Amdro. The HBA department was another large department, it had images of medicine stuff above the pharmacy window, a large seating area, and a large section with shampoos, soaps, toothpastes, over-the-counter medicine (many of Equate, the house brand), hair coloring kits, and more. I believe this is where the 1988 entrance was, and ironically became the new site of the "main" entrance following the 2009-2010 renovation.

The pet section had rack shelving, and on the back wall, there were lots of embedded tanks in the wall with fish with colors on how they'd behave with others (green, yellow, and red). Red fish were aggressive (but there were few of them). Green fish would coexist with others peacefully. The "color" notation eventually disappeared.

The food section had a candy aisle, chips, two-liter sodas, and other dry staples. It was on the other side of the Electronics section, and the wall behind Electronics, which once had spillover from the "Paper Goods / Chemicals" department (like boxes of Kleenexes) later became home to coolers with beer (the license purchased from Albertsons after it closed).

The Vision Center, located to the left from the entrance once had a way that you could run all the way through the Vision Center, out the door, and in through the Wal-Mart main entrance. Near the Vision Center were old refrigerated shelves that had faded red, yellow, and blue striping. They sold milk. There was also a reasonable selection of books and magazines. For years, they sold most of the "Wizard of Oz" series. The garden center was also there, being a humid place where plants were sold.

And up until the early 2000s, there was an occasional tent sale in the parking lot.

Sometime around the mid-2000s, they replaced the carpet in the clothing department with faux hardwood, which quickly got quite nasty-looking from scratching carts, and by the late 2000s the whole store was run-down and filthy.

But around September 2009, the local Wal-Mart decided to finally start remodeling into a Supercenter, ending rumors and putting to rest their plan to open at a proposed shopping center off Rock Prairie Road. And for the next six months or so, I was really excited. I took pictures. I attended the grand opening. I got cake at the grand opening, two types.

But the Supercenter wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. It was really huge in terms of square footage, 254,000 square feet (likely counting the garden center). This put it on par with the late 1980s "hypermarkets". The store's layout also resembled Target in many aspects. Unfortunately, they wasted a lot of space, in the backrooms, in the main store, it was a real disappointment. They actually admitted to lowering shelf height and widening aisles as part of new chainwide merchandising. The lights changed, making the store much more sterile than before. I didn't like it.

Every department shrunk. The electronics section was admittedly more open with even a display Wii, which I'm sure won't last long. Electronics was the only one that didn't downscale dramatically. Everything, Cosmetics, Jewelry, Health & Beauty, Pharmacy, Mens, Pets, Womens, Fabric, Shoes, Vision Center, everything pretty much was sliced down. Not a lot of new checkouts opened up, and they didn't even open a portrait studio in the front arcade area. A larger Subway opened up, however, but the large restaurant was one of the filthiest Subway dining areas I'd seen.

The food section wasn't that impressive: it had HVAC ceilings but plain concrete floors. They didn't bother to do anything to it. And rotesserie chickens, one of my favorite features of the Hewitt Wal-Mart Supercenter, weren't really phased in until months later. I think I got my hopes up, because I was comparing to a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Hewitt that opened in 2003 or 2004. They took out a section of parking lot for a retention pond as well, but did not even add a gas station (Murphy USA) until several yeas later.

Also, the name irritated me: they just called it "Walmart", even though it had a Supercenter inside, due to a recent corporate change that removed the Supercenter signage from the outside of stores. Much to my chagrin, Wal-Mart Supercenter stores in Houston were later repainted tan and redubbed as "Walmart".

Not much sooner had it reopened that it was the opening to an incident that left a Fort Worth police officer critically injured, and shoplifting started to dramatically increase, culminating in a shooting, wherein a military-trained LP officer was forced to shoot a shoplifter, which had both a gun (which he managed to get out of him during a struggle) and a knife. During that time, the Walmart just got as filthy as it did before the remodel, with shoplifting so high that employees harassed customers at the door for a receipt.

Here are the photos taken during the remodeling process. These first ones were taken early on in the process, around October 2009 or so.


The first order of business was to rip into the old Albertsons.


The new pharmacy, then floating in a sea of cheap t-shirts


The new pharmacy, again


A barrier was put up on the side of the store where the addition would come in. As of February 1, 2010, the actual walls had not come down yet, but this is looking up to the ceiling. I never did find out when the walls actually came down.

Old vision center. This was a fairly open area originally, with this part of the lobby in front of the checkout stand. A bench was around here.
Checkout stands have been moved back.

Makeshift vision center. It eventually moved to an alcove spot in front of the store.



This is around Easter break, after the original entrance had closed



A rainy day in February, I believe. This has the original walls of the store, and also proves that the Yelp photo is incorrect.



New signage. Identities obscured.



I'm not sure when this picture was taken. It was early 2010, that's all I know.



Another angle.

Look out! A giant spider! This was what the "Outdoor Living" entrance area looked like when it was new and fully enclosed in early 2010 (as the rest of the pictures were).


Before I got an iPhone, this was my cellphone wallpaper.


This used to be Subway, taken sometime in April or late March.


...

Velcro board so departments could move around.
In 2016, the store remodeled, mostly changing out décor and signage, moving some departments around, painting the grocery department white (instead of yellow) and tearing out the floor tiles, which had been replaced in 2010 with new tiles, but even the 2010 tiles now had to go for a uniform concrete floor, but with it, I can't find where the 1988 store ends and the 1995 store begins.

UPDATE 05-13-2024: A second remodel was done in 2024. This changed the exterior appearance of the store (mostly repainting) but notably moved the pharmacy and HBA department closer to where it was originally.