The Notorious Harvey Road Apartments

From here, we see what was originally Tanglewood South.

I don't write about apartment complexes all that often, when I do it's usually as part of something more interesting, like Mansard House restaurant at Doux Chene Apartments. Later, during the period I ran The Houston Files, there were some quirky apartments I did cover but it's still a rarity.

Following the Harvey Road series (it's across from Fazoli's), I titled this the way I did because it's got some bad press in recent years (if we go by examples in Houston, dense, super-large apartment complexes are never a good idea) and it may not even be the Pearl Apartments in a few years from now. By the year 1984, three apartment complexes were operating along Harvey Road: Travis House (505 Hwy. 30), Tanglewood South Apartments (411 Highway 30), and Courtyard Apartments (600 University Oaks).

By 1998, Tanglewood South was now Kensington Place (401 Harvey Road, same block), with BCAD records indicate that the name had been in place since the early 1990s.

By 2002, the apartments were known as "University Place I & II", likely due to the common ownership around 2000.

Down the street, looking east. Note the Circle K in the distance.

Now, from what I could tell, as late as 2007, Courtyard Apartments (built in 1977, wasn't able to find when Tanglewood South was built) still operated independently, at least, as its own brand, with Campus View operating the rest (it had adopted the name by that time). In 2011, Vesper Campus View LLC, the holding company that owned the other two apartment complexes, bought Courtyard, and it was absorbed into Campus View.

In the last five years, the local media has shown a light on how bad Campus View really is, with hundreds of calls to the police every year, with drug issues, public drunkenness, fighting, shootings, domestic violence, along with multiple maintenance issues. At least under The Marc, the new name adopted in 2016, reviews have been horrible.

This picture illustrates all three complexes, notice the different building designs.

From reading, reviews under another name a few years later with new management, Pearl Apartments, have improved, at least in terms of better management and weeding out the worst residents. But these things can change on a dime (it doesn't help the last time I was in the area, the surrounding blocks were being swarmed with cops due to a shooting in the complex), and without living there it's difficult to judge.

Editor's Note: I wanted to mostly write about this for completionists' sake since it deals with the history of three different apartment complexes. In the next few posts, we'll talk about the restaurants along Harvey Road.

Fazoli's at Harvey Road

Apologies for the lower-res than normal picture, it was taken from Connecting Point's parking lot.
From the parking lot of Connecting Point Church or OfficeMax, depending on what year it is, we come across the Fazoli's restaurant at 400 Harvey Road. Fazoli's is actually one of those chain restaurants that the Houston area doesn't have anymore (or Dallas for that matter), and the College Station location is just one of 15 restaurants as of this writing, scattered across Texas with no more than one per city (except Waco, which has two).

BCAD says that Fazoli's was built in 2001, a few years after the OfficeMax was built. It's been years since I went to Fazoli's, but from what I remember, the food really wasn't worth writing home about. The menu emphasized pasta, but for things like spaghetti and meatballs, you could make that at home fairly easily, and even things like the breadsticks (which were rather salty) have frozen-food equivalents. I don't remember there being anything that I ordered there that's rather difficult to craft at home (like, say, a steak or french fries). That's at least how I remember it, maybe it's changed since then, but this isn't a food review blog, that's what Yelp is for.

This picture and above was taken by the author, October 2019.


UPDATE 06-07-2025: Fazoli's opened June 2001 as seen here. This was definitely during the heyday of Harvey Road as a dining spot, but the same month the road lost another—Chelsea Street Pub closed at Post Oak Mall.

Connecting Point Church / Former OfficeMax

Reusing the big box.

To break out of the recent hiatus, I had to think of a splashy new idea, and not just some random photo of a small commercial building (it would have been quite easy to just post a photo of the Southwest Parkway Wendy's and call it a day). I had started writing on the Westinghouse plant/The Science Park/Providence Park but I still didn't have photos for it.

Rather, I was walking around today in the Harvey Road area, and it hit me. Why don't I make a series on Harvey Road? Not on the road itself, although I've done that in the past, but rather some of the things along it. Previous posts on Harvey Road as of this writing include Former Circuit City, Post Oak Square, and the building which is now Fuddruckers.

The first building is one at 410 Harvey Road, which opened June 1997 as an OfficeMax superstore, with all of OfficeMax's "store-within-a-store" features at the time, like FurnitureMax (office furniture) and CopyMax (print-for-pay services). The new OfficeMax also included space for a small fast food restaurant in front of it (later developed as Fazoli's), and a new access road, a stubbed-out George Bush Drive East road that ended before crossing Wolf Pen Creek.

I never went to OfficeMax all that often, probably collectively less than a half a dozen times before it closed in early 2012 and moved to a smaller location at Central Station and later closed. Within a few years, the building began hosting Connecting Point Church, which later renovated the building (not much, really) and put up permanent signage on the building.

The church's foyer area and entrance to the coffee shop.

As the church is fairly small, there are two sub-tenants inside, both of which connect to the church foyer proper, The Brew Coffeehouse, open from 7am to midnight daily (except for Friday and Saturday, when it closes at 11), and Aggieland Pregnancy Outreach.

The back corridor with the restrooms hasn't changed much since the OfficeMax days.

UPDATE 04-08-2025: The store opened in June 1997. The article has been amended to reflect this. Additionally, the Editor's Note teasing a series on Harvey Road has been removed (no longer current).

Texaco, Longmire Drive

Picture by author, September 2019
One more story before a major rewrite of the post on the College Station Walmart is done, the gas station on the corner of Longmire and FM 2818, southeast corner. Originally addressed as 1600 FM 2818 before becoming 2201 Longmire Drive, the gas station opened after Walmart but before Albertsons, opening around 1989 as perhaps the last "original" Circle K store to be built in the area. By the time Circle K left the area in 1999 and sold the stores to Duke & Long as mentioned in the post on Circle K Truxtop, the Circle K stores in Houston were long gone, having sold those to National Convenience Stores, which rebranded them as Stop N Go, which ultimately turned out to be a fortuitous move as whatever was left of those stores plus new ones were re-taken by Circle K within the last year as of this writing.

As for this store, the name eventually gave way to "Handi Stop" after Everyday, with the Conoco trading in its name for Diamond Shamrock (the last prototype with an italicized logo) in the early 2000s and Texaco taking command in the late 2000s as new owner Valero discontinued the Diamond Shamrock name, a move surely not unnoticed by the former "Sevcik's Texaco" across the street.