College Station's Kmart / College Station Shopping Plaza

The former store as it stood c. late 2010


The shopping center at the northwest corner of Harvey Mitchell Parkway and Texas Avenue has a long and storied history. This post originally went up in June 1, 2010 and has been added and edited to over the years and last received a rewrite in 2014 before the current rewrite in 2021.

There's many reasons for the decline and disappearance of Kmart. Under its original form (pre-2002) it was due to poor management and culminations of not investing properly in its store base, preferring store growth over investments in its old stores. Post-2004 was all about draining assets from it along with Sears, but that happened long after Kmart left town (though could be seen with Sears at Post Oak Mall, unfortunately.

Kmart opened at 2700 Texas Avenue South on May 18, 1974, not long after the opening of FM 2818, the "West Loop". Unusually for Texas Avenue, it was not located on the road directly, instead on the frontage roads that curved into FM 2818. When the Kmart opened, it was store #7013, one of their smallest prototypes (without the 9000-series used in rural stores) in the south end of College Station. The store also featured an adjacent grocery store as well. In the early days of Kmart, "Kmart Foods" was a discount-oriented grocery store not technically part of the store (no cross-buying between sections) and operated by a local third party. (Target also did something similar in the 1970s). In the case of this part of Texas, it was Houston-based Lewis & Coker, which opened as its own name rather than Kmart Foods.

The stores did have an interior connection, but not for very long, as the whole Kmart Foods program was already on its way out at the time of the store opening. The Kmart was typical of stores of that era: a white slanted roof and ridged concrete. Lewis & Coker would close this store in the late 1970s with Piggly Wiggly taking over in 1977. The changeover was similar to the gutting of AppleTree years later, quickly go through and change prices in around 48 hours. The store was only about 19,000 square feet (of selling space) and was the only Piggly Wiggly to have a bakery. At some point in the late 1980s, however, Piggly Wiggly closed, and Kmart found a new neighbor across the street that would ultimately contribute to the store's closure (and would do irreparable damage to the chain as a whole), the Wal-Mart at the southwest corner of the intersection, opened in 1988. Rather than remodel, Kmart merely changed their logo in the early 1990s (supposedly they did expand into the Piggly Wiggly space, but I can't confirm that).


Kmart advertising in a 1976 Texas A&M-Texas Tech basketball program

In February 1995, facing a (relatively new) Wal-Mart preparing to remodel, a nice new Target up the road (opened 1992), and the closure of Piggly Wiggly (that is, if the "expansion into Piggly Wiggly" didn't actually took place), the Kmart, now badly dated, was shuttered in a round of closings announced in September 1994 (it never even got automatic doors). Target remained popular and the renovated Wal-Mart got a new shade of blue that Wal-Mart loved so much in the 1990s and even had a McDonald's inside, and of course, both still operate today.


Kmart, shortly after closing. Ferreri's Italian is in the upper right.

With Kmart's vacancy, it left 83,000 square feet open. By the end of the year, however, Tractor Supply Co. moved in the far left part of the store (or the southern part, for those thinking geographically) and remodeled the interior and exterior (the exterior being the metal siding TSC is known for) but only for that part of the store. The TSC took over the garden center part of the store and was rebadged as 2704 Texas Avenue, as most of the former Kmart was still vacant.

In 1996, Big Lots opened in the center of the former store (taking the main facade) and Dollar General (cutting into the ridged '70s concrete Kmart was known for) opened in the remaining space. Big Lots took the 2700 address and I believe Dollar General did too (though I'd have to look at my phone books to confirm that). Dollar General only lasted a few years before giving way to Goodwill (though it ran a store at Longmire and Harvey Mitchell for a few years as well), and around 2001, a discount grocery store concept called "YES!Less" featuring a rather obnoxious-looking anthropomorphic exclamation mark filled in the vacant Kmart Foods/Lewis & Coker/Piggly Wiggly (and ironically, this was operated by Fleming Cos., which was Kmart's main food provider at the time). The former Kmart and its adjoining stores were finally full. There's not a lot of pictures of Yes!Less out there, but you can see a picture at my Waco - Valley Mills page at Carbon-izer.

In 2003, YES!Less went out of business (along with the rest of Fleming, really) but quickly reopened under California-based Grocery Outlet (branded as "Grocery Outlet Bargains Only". Save-a-Lot bought Grocery Outlet and reopened it AGAIN if ever so briefly, and I'm sure it was gone by spring 2005. It only lasted a matter of months, and I don't remember it much at all.

Big Lots closed around 2005 (there was a store closure wave), and with the added vacancy of the grocery store space, it once again started to look like it had been a decade prior when Kmart closed.

In 2006, the entire shopping center was given a major exterior facelift (though was never able to get rid of the Kmart concrete ridges), three new tenants were signed on, and it was renamed as "College Station Shopping Plaza". BCS Asian Market (also known as BCS Food Market) came around this time to the old Grocery Outlet (with 2704 Texas Avenue #4 as the address), AutoZone was built in the parking lot next to Taste of China (2706 Texas Avenue), and U-Rent-It (2704 Texas Avenue #5) built on the side of the building and using cinderblocks instead. The parking lot lights are also original. The big change was that the stores were ALL renumbered as 2704 (this probably means Goodwill, now 2704 #3, was changed, since Goodwill opened while Big Lots was still extant).

U-Rent-It closed in 2008, and was eventually replaced (2010) by "The Everything Backyard Store", which renamed to Champion Pools & Patios (same business, though I'm afraid the Facebook proof from that is gone) and relocated out a few years afterwards (by 2012, it looks like) to the College Station Business Center just west of the center until it eventually disappeared. Ultimately, the space at CSSP remained vacant until a 2015 renovation to Impact Church, and became CSL Plasma in 2016 (still open as of December 2018).

Big Lots remained vacant, however. but returned to College Station in 2009 when it occupied an old Goody's further north. In spring 2014, it was finally filled with Vista College (training in things like HVAC, so no Blinn competition here). Vista College also replaced a rusting roadside sign that used to be where the Kmart sign was.



The 2006 redo effectively deleted the 2700 address for years until a new building was built next to AutoZone around late 2017, which was labeled 2700, but as of November 2021 this building remains vacant.

UPDATE 11-09-2021: Another update/rewrite completed. It fixes an error from the 2014 rewrite, gets rid of the "three parts" structure, and updates the dates of when TSC and Big Lots opened.
UPDATE 04-05-2023: I totally missed the fact that Vista College abruptly closed in 2021. Some other changes were made as well.

Greens Prairie Road and William D. Fitch Parkway

This page has moved off-site. See you at Carbon-izer!

Koppe Bridge Bar & Grill

While the trees have definitely grown over the years, it's not quite as leafy and secluded as this picture appears. (Picture by author, June 2019)
One of the most popular pages on the blog used to be a page on Koppe Bridge, the actual Koppe Bridge of which I attached an image from Project HOLD of the bridge from the 1960s. Sadly, as Google SEO rules everything, the page that comes up for searches of that type comes up with this page and not my own page. They talk about Batt's Ferry too, that's where the "modern" photos are from.

The bridge in the 1960s, already condemned. Presumably, the bridge was not repaired or rebuilt as it was not worth it to repair, with what was called Jones Bridge Road (FM 60) being a better route in and out of Brazos County, rather into a network of unimproved roads and no direct access to modern-day Wellborn Road. The timbers were dismantled, and despite Google Maps STILL mislabeling Hopes Creek Road as going out to the river and not Koppe Bridge Road going out to the river all these years later, the bridge only has some pilings left that are barely identifiable on Google Earth today.

Once the old Koppe Bridge post dropped out of the top ten posts, I felt that I could convert the page into a format that the rest of the blog uses, on buildings and businesses, of course. Before I settled on that, one of the features that I wanted to cover in the blog fairly early on when I had little idea of what I really wanted to cover were a series of posts entitled "The Wellborn Way" in which I would describe Wellborn Road as going through it in the late 1990s, with all the changes that encompassed it. One of the eventual posts that came out of that mess included the original Chevron in Wellborn and Veronica's Country Corner.

The Wellborn Road as I remember it was pretty empty all the way from Rock Prairie to Wellborn, with little things that disappeared over the years, such as a small shed at Deacon and Wellborn (with a roof turbine) and a series of telegraph poles that ran from the FM 2818 intersection beyond (these were removed around 1999-2000, shortly before the Rock Prairie crossing was built), and there was Koppe Bridge, located at the corner of Sallie Lane and Wellborn Road.

Over time, small expansions to the building and parking lot were done, with the back parking lot done shortly after the widening of Wellborn Road took out more parking. When Wellborn Road was reconstructed as a divided six-lane road by 2011, it disallowed left turns in and out of Sallie Lane and the Koppe Bridge parking lot.

Balcones Drive was built sprouting off of Wellborn (it did not connect to Balcones Drive off of Welsh), and Sallie Lane was deleted entirely. The mobile home directly behind Koppe Bridge, I remember had an address of 2799 Sallie Lane, but after Balcones was built that whole property became 200 Balcones. The entrance from Sallie Lane to Wellborn was cut off, part of it became a section of Koppe Bridge's parking lot and the rest became a new driveway off of Balcones.

Koppe Bridge's website claims that the building was "originally an old feed store that we converted into our restaurant" and "some of the original timbers in the floor at the Wellborn Road location are from the old Koppe Bridge that spanned the Brazos River until the late 1920's when it was eventually destroyed by flood waters".

Well, the bridge was not destroyed in the late 1920s, it was in the 1960s...but the building actually isn't that old. Brazos CAD has the building being built in 1987 (it wasn't in early 1980s aerials), which begs the question of how long those timbers were sitting in storage before being used for the building...if it's even true at all. From 1988 to the very early 1990s it was TomPac Feed & Supply.

As their website states, Koppe Bridge opened in October 1992, with other additions completed later over time in the style of the original building (the oldest part is the dining room between the main doors and the ordering counters), but despite the deceptive age the building, it certainly feels a bit out of place with the modern Jones Crossing. Most of the parking lot is still unpaved (grandfathered in) and at some point the residence(s) behind it will be torn down for commercial development.

UPDATE 4/30/2021: Completely revamped the entire page to focus on the restaurant. Also changed the date from January 2, 2011 to January 3, 2011 to avoid conflict with an article on LoTrak.

[Side Stories] LoTrak

Updated on June 28, 2013, with the correct spelling of the word, also renamed from "LoTrack: What Little We Know"

Being in College Station, I can say that The Eagle keeps the worst archives of newspapers around.

One of the more interesting things I heard I've heard about the history of the city was the circa-1993 proposal of "LoTrak" officially) was a way to avoid railroad crossings along Wellborn Road.

The main reason is that both College Station voters didn't want to do it (or was it Texas A&M?) even though TxDOT, the county, and Bryan would do it (it would cost millions, as seen above).

The original plan (seen above) was a sunken trench that would basically allow trains to descend about 25 feet below street level around Southwest Parkway, and convert Wellborn Road to a divided highway. What's bizarre is that Villa Maria Road and FM 2818 (it was FM 2818 back then!) as railroad crossings, which ironically are the only ones today that have replaced their at-grade crossings with overpasses or underpasses since the LoTrak proposal.

I've heard some earlier conflicting stories about this (source and other source), as some have claimed that it would go past 2818, or be partially elevated (possibly around University, maybe, which already had an overpass)

Later the possibility came up of rerouting the railroad to the west (that I remember) around 2001. That was even more difficult to imagine. First off, had they done that, my best friend would've moved out of town (he had lived in River Run). Furthermore, I couldn't imagine (and still can't, frankly) the railroad being abandoned along Wellborn. That would leave a lifeless right-of-way along Wellborn, bumping over patched crossings and seeing nothing but a scarred grass path, which would eventually give way to a full highway.


Updated to 2013 Format 5/15