Comm. Building Permits College Station in the Late 1980s

This is removed from the Index and only serves as a resource to what links here.

We rarely get stuff this neat: this is a list of commercial buildings for the late 1980s (taken from a city-produced master plan guide from circa 1990).

Southgate Chevron

I snapped this picture from the bus, taken sometime around 2013. The Reveille's sign can't be seen from this angle.
This building, home to Texas FilmWorks since late 2023, was for decades a gas station, originally opened in the 1960s as the Southside Gulf Service (300 Jersey, later 300 George Bush Drive), and converted to a convenience store (Reveille's) sometime around the late 1980s (that's what Brazos CAD suggests) with the Chevron name being bestowed in the early 1990s due to a merger. In 2011, I got the below picture that shows the Gulf station and the surrounding area (due to the city reorganizing the Project HOLD server from which I got it from, I can't find the original link and who that is) circa 1985.


Click for larger size/higher resolution.

It's great seeing the George Bush (er, Jersey) stoplight as it was...the "old style" of College Station stoplights (before they were all replaced or upgraded), complete with the old railroad crossing (a cantilever railroad crossing...but where's the crossing gate?), and all those trees, too: this must have been before the area around Olsen Field was developed, and a time when you could probably still see the I-GN right of way on both sides.

Somewhere on Project HOLD there's a picture of the gas station at night, though I can't link directly to it because PH keeps breaking the links. Later on, it updated once to the newer 2005 design (didn't roll out fully until the late 2000s), and has always been Reveille's (convenience store) at least since the mid-1990s (if not further back). In early 2017, it was de-branded as "K.D. Timmons Co. Inc." (a local fuel supplier and the only one of its kind, though it kept the Chevron colors), and by July 2018 permanently closed, remaining abandoned for the next five years or so.

UPDATE 02-25-2019: Rewrite incorporating 2018 update, new title
UPDATE 01-04-2024: More extensive rewrite and adding current tenant.

Campus Theater

Campus Theater in better days. I got this version from a different website. There used to be a better version of this photo (higher resolution, better color) that I linked to on Flickr; unfortunately the whole account seems to be wiped. At least a marginally better version can be seen on CinemaTreasures by the original uploader.
The Campus Theater opened in Northgate in May 1940, on the corner of Boyett and University at what is currently 217 University Drive. It was the first movie theater in College Station, and ended up lasting a very long time. Done in an art deco style and with a single screen (it had a balcony and cry room, too!) and showing Son of the Navy as its premier film, by the 1960s it was purchased by the Schulman theater group and operated with their downtown theaters, the Palace and the Queen.

By 1980, it had gotten a reputation as the "X-rated theater" but from what I've gathered wasn't the same sort of thing that was shown in Houston's nastier theaters at the time. When exactly this happened, I'm not sure. In 1973 they had Burt Reynolds' White Lightning (rated PG) but by 1976 it was the one showing the X-rated The Story of O. In January 1980 they had Life of Brian, a bit sacrilegious with some PG-13 humor (if such a rating existed at the time), in February 1982 they had Caligula, but an R-rated cut that was 102 minutes as opposed to the 156 minute unedited release.

In July 1984 it closed and would remain closed for nearly the next decade. The same article talks about the building being "the most charming structure in Northgate, rising above the smaller buildings with neon lights and art deco style architecture". While it doesn't command the presence it used to...not with the apartment buildings rising behind it, anyway...around 1995 it finally reopened as Shadow Canyon, which soon after gave it a dreadful makeover by covering over much of the building in wood to give it a country-western theme, and that's been the type of tenant of it's been ever since. Shadow Canyon did well initially, but it faltered (apparently they had started charging a cover and used gimmicks like wet t-shirt contests to gain attendance). From this article, it officially closed in December 2004 though it played host to the Northgate Music Festival in early 2005.

Unfortunately, none of the successor tenants improved the appearance and arguably made it worse. Next up was Midnight Rodeo, which still has locations in San Antonio and Amarillo (an Austin location has closed since 2013). But the College Station location did not last nearly as long as Shadow Canyon, as it opened in early 2006 and closed by summer 2007 (it was supposed to be a five year lease, and a number of other dance halls owned by the same company closed around the time, such as one at the Katy Mills mall in the Houston area).


Source: the now-defunct Panaramio (user rahultiitd), showing how Campus Theater was "renovated".
Daisy Dukes opened in early 2009, by the same owners of Cafe Eccell.¹ In spring 2013, Daisy Dukes took advantage of the upper level the original building had and opened rooftop seating right above the marquee, with seating and televisions. By November, it was renamed to Duke's, and by summer 2014 changed hands to The Tap's owners.¹ By fall 2014 it had reopened as Boulevard 217² before closing around December 2015. Shiner Park closed in 2025, but unfortunately, no revival for the theater came, and it was to become "Harry's Northgate", which was named after (licensed? homage? knockoff?) the late Hurricane Harry's which closed in December 2024.

1. The original version of this post was far less sympathetic to the Eccell Group, and while similar sentiments have slowly been taken out, it remained up for a long time.
2. For a short time, the marquee from Duke's had been removed and it was called "No Name Saloon" on local media officially. Boulevard 217 got a really bad reputation really quickly if I recall.

UPDATE 01-13-2026: Post rewritten. In addition to adding [Costa Dallis] and [College Station] to the post it adds [regrettable renovations] which I've applied to other posts.

Ramada Aggieland Inn

This paint job was never used for an operational hotel.
Opening in summer 1974 as the Aggieland Inn (named after a long-defunct hotel on campus, which had long been functionally replaced by the MSC and gone for many years), this hotel was initially successful with its restaurant ("Whistle Stop") but in the mid-1980s renamed to Aggieland Hotel. After (or around the time) Ramada pulled its name from a bankrupt hotel down the road, the it was renamed Ramada Aggieland Hotel, then Ramada Inn (which it was for years), then simply "Ramada" (due to rebranding). In 2010, the owners of the Ramada name, Wyndham Worldwide, built a new Ramada near the corner of University Drive East and Earl Rudder Freeway, and the name of this hotel changed to Aggieland Inn.

Football program, 1988-1989

Even before losing the name, the Ramada had been going on a downhill trend for years, there's a story about how the restaurant (by this time, having long dropped the Whistle Stop name and advertising outside of hotel guests) accidentally(?) gave food poisoning to the Longhorn football team circa '99, and other minor stories of what happened there. Moving the Ramada to the highway was surely planned a few years before, and in late 2007, an ambitious plan was announced to turn the Ramada into upscale student housing. The late AbouTown Press covered this in December 2007, which you can see the scans of below (click for higher resolution).




As Aggieland Inn, as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, the hotel got miserable reviews. The hotel shut down in September 2011 (KBTX's link was down, this was before I learned to archive links) just prior to football season. In 2013, it got a repaint and was rumored to reopen for the fall, but it never did. Here's a Google Maps 45° view of the hotel before the repaint.

The restaurant/lobby/banquet hall building is about the size of the hotel itself.
In addition to the new photo at the top of the page, in April 2015, I made a visit to snap some more pictures. However, there were lots of No Trespassing signs in the area, and I wasn't going to get arrested for some semi-defunct blog I was just updating, so here's one more shot of the hotel (I didn't get too close to the lobby part, unfortunately).

It almost looks decent...

The redevelopment around 2015-2016 essentially split the property into two parts. The hotel itself got a big renovation inside and out, with the pool out front demolished for a new lobby, and the peaked roof removed for a new hotel, TRYP by Wyndham. The hotel (with a new address of 1508 Texas Avenue S.) eventually opened in November 2017.

The lobby and restaurant space of the old Aggieland Inn was gutted and became a strip mall.

Picture from August 2019.
Suite 100 was Urban Bricks Pizza Co., which opened May 2017, closed in early 2019, reopened later that year, and closed for good in February 2020. Wayback Burgers opened September 2016 but closed December 2018. The others are Fancy Nails & Spa (Ste. 300), Ye Star Chinese Buffet (Ste. 400), and SignatureCare Emergency Center. The privately owned emergency room opened first in 2016. Ye Star and Fancy Nails I believe opened in 2017.

UPDATE 03-12-2022: As of March 2022, the hotel is now known as "Aggieland Boutique Hotel" (who knows if TRYP quietly closed for a time). Also, Suite 200, the former Wayback Burgers, reopened in early 2021 as "Smokerz Paradize".
UPDATE 02-17-2023: I typically don't do minor strip mall updates, but Dave's Hot Chicken opened in December 2022 in the former Urban Bricks space.
UPDATE 01-13-2026: Sometime very recently (December or this month) this is now a branded hotel operation again, "voco College Station Aggieland". The "voco" brand is one of IHG's, it was introduced in 2018 and expanded to the United States a few years later. IHG owns Holiday Inn (has owned it since it was bought by Bass PLC years ago, IHG is Bass with the other non-hotel businesses stripped away). The old Holiday Inn is of course right across the street (read all about it!