4.0 & Gone

April 2020 picture again, later on we'll get to some livelier but older ones.

With Hullabaloo Hall now covered, I'm going to try to do a complete "walk" down University Drive, excluding the things already covered. What would be 201 University was a gas station (Magnolia brand) demolished when the underpass was originally built, 203 University was Deluxe Diner most of my life and Chimy's Cerveceria for the better part of the 2010s, and now we get to 205-207 University, which is a bit of a misnomer since the 205 University address never seems to have been used officially (though that is what it is according to Brazos CAD).

In previous versions of this post, I had said that this building was built in the 1960s; actually, it was built in the 1980s as an extension of 209 University, which explains why I couldn't find much of it prior to the late 1980s. In July 1990, the first tenant, New York Bagel Shop opened. New York Bagels was a chain out of Oklahoma¹ and opened other stores in Texas as well. New York Bagels used the 207 University address, while the followup operation, M&M Grill, used the 209A address when it opened later that year. M&M Grill was a Mediterranean restaurant which operated until 1998, then DoubleDave's PizzaWorks moved in around 1999, relocating from a few spaces down. In 2005 it closed and relocated to Texas Avenue Crossing. In February 2006 it reopened as Schotzi's, with "SkyyBar" (a bar-within-a-bar, later simply just Sky Bar) located on the upper level (at the time, the patio above 209 University had not yet been built). A few years later Schotzi's adopted the 207 University address (which had not been used since New York Bagel). Sometime around 2013 or 2014, Skyybar simply became Sky Bar but in 2015 Schotzi's folded entirely and was replaced by 4.0 & Go, formerly located at Park Place Plaza.

4.0 & Go went away in late 2019. Presumably, the high rent drove them off, despite a workable parking plan. When I originally wrote this article, 4.0 & Go was technically active but was listed on their website as being "in transit". It appears to have disappeared for good during COVID-19. By late 2021 it had reopened as "Good Bull Icehouse" (no relation to the now-defunct Good Bull BBQ).

1. Despite hot growth, the chain filed for Chapter 11 in 2000. There does not seem to be any restaurants under that name anymore.

UPDATE 07-29-2025: Rewrote article to refine a few things, fixed date.

Hullabaloo Hall and the Three Dorms Before It

The world was shut down in April 2020.
It has a long time since I added any campus TAMU buildings to this site, the last official one being added was...Scoates Hall, back in December 2014.

I used to work at Texas A&M University briefly in 2017, and I had ideas to add a number of new entries focused on TAMU buildings after the last post was done and the blog went on hiatus for one and a half years, longer than any gap in its history. As a result, those were basically cancelled, and the one post I actually had been working on, "At Home" on the Boriskie Ranch appeared nearly two years after it was supposed to. (I had also planned a big rewrite of The Commons)

This particular post was supposed to be added back in late 2014 as "Defunct Dorm Roundup" and even was to include information on Law Hall, Puryear Hall, Cain Hall (which had not yet been demolished by that point, but was no longer dorms), and Hotard Hall. Perhaps more on those another day (especially Cain Hall!)

Crocker Hall, Moore Hall, and McInnis Hall were all separate buildings but all immediately adjacent to each other and formed a "U" shape (with the open part of the U facing west, and featuring a small dorm lounge building), and from the side closest to University, it was Crocker, McInnis, and Moore. All three dorms, much like FHK, Walton/Schuhmacher Hall, the Corps dorms, and the Commons dorms, had a dorm culture in each dorm, and shared amongst other dorms. (It's weird. Observation or Internet threads only gives you a taste).

Crocker Hall was built in 1942, looking like this. McInnis was a "balcony"-style dorm built in 1964 (FHK complex is another "balcony" dorm, but culturally different), and Moore Hall was more like Crocker Hall and also built in 1942.

In 2010, the announcement came that the dorms would be replaced with a larger dorm (first on campus since the 1980s) and after the spring 2011 semester, demolition commenced. By October of that year, the dorms, the nearby "dorm lounge", and a basketball court between them and Walton Hall were gone, replaced with a big hole in the ground.

Not too long after, it was revealed the new dorm to replace it would be called Hullabaloo Hall, despite the fact that Texas A&M Galveston had already had a dorm of that same name. When Hullabaloo Hall (the one in College Station) opened in fall 2013 (at 306 University Drive), it included a new stoplight at Boyett and University, and replacing three other driveways (which were no longer as useful due to medians added on University). Dulie Bell was demolished after fall 2013 to provide more parking space for Hullabaloo Hall, and a new basketball court and a new sand volleyball court at the site of the Special Services Building.

While it doesn't have the requisite "swimming pool for wild parties", Hullabaloo Hall had other features similar to off-campus dorms (including "study rooms", etc.) and two retail tenants, a Starbucks, and a convenience store. When Hullabaloo Hall first opened, it featured a location of Rattlers' inside, but the contract ended within a year (now it's just "Aggie Express" or whatever Chartwells calls its convenience stores these days).

Shipley Do-Nuts, Southwest Parkway

Do-Nut You Forget About Me. (Picture from author, 4/20)


If I had to describe "which road best represents my childhood", it would have to be Southwest Parkway. There was the Citgo there at the corner of Southwest Parkway and Wellborn, before Southwest Crossing was built, a common fuel and convenience stop (more will be discussed when the gas station is added), the Texaco station at Welsh Avenue, those weird townhome-style apartments catty-corner to that (Embassy Townhomes), South Knoll Elementary School (where I went to school, and was once covered on this site, though mostly I described its dark, pre-renovation corridors), and small streets where family friends lived.

Further down the road was Parkway Baptist Church and Bee Creek Park, where seasonally Adamson's Lagoon (which I also used to have a post on) would be a great spot to take the family. It's not nearly as good now, I haven't been to it for years (my siblings grew up and left home), but it did decline objectively, with the floating snake and frog eventually being chained to the pool floor (if they're even still there—and I do remember the incident as to WHY they're chained), the crowds increasing (with the price), and the removal of the diving board.

Parkway Baptist Church was where my Boy Scout troop was located (I never became an Eagle Scout) and, it's hard to notice from the street, but a few houses down you can see that there's a duplex with one side of the house having slightly different brick than the other. The reason for this is because around 2000 there was no fence from Southwest Parkway and it was used as a front yard (there's a small alley off Welsh). However, one night a drunk driver careened off of the road and crashed through the side of the house, killing a young girl in her sleep. I don't have the news story with me but that's how I remember it happening. As I passed the area pretty frequently I could see where the front of the house was boarded up, and although it happened gradually over the next 12 years, eventually all the houses between the church and Welsh had fences built along Southwest Parkway.

Finally, there was Parkway Square, featuring Kroger (of course), but also Baskin-Robbins, a video rental store, and a McDonald's that was often visited. I know I've covered Arby's and what I mostly remembered as a vacant building but there was one place I haven't covered yet, haven't even mentioned it as of this writing except for a throwaway line on the Post Oak Square article. That would be Shipley Do-Nuts, located at 1716 Southwest Parkway, originally built in 1984.

The "do-nut" shop is best known before its most recent facade update around 2017-2018, with its appearance which removed the message board as well as changed the main signage piece. The new remodel also removed the tiny marquee lightbulbs around the signage, which used to light up and dance around the sign. I don't know the specific reason they stopped, whether it being too expensive to maintain, machinery got broken down, or ordinances preventing it. (Probably both).

UPDATE 03-12-2022: As of this writing, I'm working on a full Southwest Parkway page on Carbon-izer.com, so check that out soon. One thing that I failed to mention in the original 2020 article is that a car apparently took drive-through a bit too literally and crashed through the front of it, so the brick in the center front is not original. It happened sometime in the 2000s and was the ol' "confused the gas pedal for the brake" problem. I also failed to mention the shop was opened in 1988.

Exxon Rock Prairie and Wellborn

There was another Exxon located on Rock Prairie's other end. More on that another time. (Picture by author, Apr. 2020)
Sometime around 1997 or 1998, Rock Prairie Road was extended from Victoria Avenue to Wellborn Road, eliminating the need to trek back on North Graham toward Victoria. Within a few years, an Exxon station was built and later, a stoplight (I'm pretty sure the stoplight came before the railroad crossing--which upgraded and extended Gandy Road into a full extension to North Dowling Road).

This Exxon station (at 12727 FM 2154) anchors the southeast corner of the intersection, with the Shell station coming in about 3-5 years afterward.

Brazos CAD isn't all that clear when everything was built, indicating the car wash was built a full two years before the convenience store was in 2000. In the first year or two, the Exxon featured an A&W restaurant, which had returned to College Station-Bryan after a 20+ year absence (there was a location near the modern-day intersection of University Drive and Texas Avenue, but that's for another post). A&W's attempt at what was then south College Station didn't last long at all, and I had to make sure of it through some digging on Project HOLD to make sure it wasn't just the power of suggestion getting to me, but by early 2001 A&W was gone, and a Sonic took its place in the summer of 2001. The addition of Sonic added the traditional Sonic canopies to about seven parking spaces, and evidence suggests these were functional carhop spaces.

In 2008, the Sonic moved to a new space next door and the space was abandoned. By early 2009, it was operating as Taco Casa, which reused a lot of Sonic's infrastructure by painting the red trim on the canopies orange to match Taco Casa's branding scheme. But it too closed after a few years (sometime in mid-2011). It didn't help Taco Casa's case that 2009 and 2010 were plagued with major construction. The Exxon actually lost about a dozen parking spaces in the front, with an entrance to Rock Prairie also closed (though that became three new spaces). Sometime within this same time frame, the signage updated to electronic numbering.

Finally, around early 2013, the space was filled with Little Caesars, which ditched the interior seating for a walk-up counter and the only Little Caesars in the area with a drive-through.

The main "Tigerland Express" food mart was there from the start, with a third tenant serving as a liquor/tobacco store (but is only accessed from the inside, despite the presence of an exterior door). Finally, the car wash is next to the convenience store.