Former KFC in Dallas (Dallas, Texas)

From Loopnet, slightly cropped. I'm not sure WHEN they took this picture. It looked like they scanned it in.
Among various projects here on Numbered Exits is splitting up or retiring various posts that don't fit anymore (about a dozen posts remain in this category, roughly). This post is a short one, splitting off from this post to focus on the restaurant next door, 3806 South Polk Street.

This was a KFC; according to the Loopnet link above the actual building dates back to 1979 (looks more like a mid-1980s build to me) with Kentucky Fried Chicken first building here in 1971 (and rebuilding later).

Al Chile Tacos currently takes up residence. It is the fourth restaurant after the initial replacement; after KFC left, it was replaced by "Chicken House", then "Tu Taco", then "Don Taco".

As of this writing, Al Chile has a looping video on their website that shows this location among various other food items, though their "Sushi Estilo Sinaloa" they show prominently (beef fajita, sour cream, and avocado wrapped in rice and rolled in what appears to be Tajin) is not at this location.

Super 8 (Hope, Arkansas)

From TripAdvisor.
I'm back! I've decided, in light of the rather intense posting schedule over the last few weeks before the break, that new posts should go up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (may be delayed), but sharing duties with The Houston Files and Brazos Buildings & Businesses (so not necessarily three posts in a week for Numbered Exits). Seeing as how I got back from a vacation which I'll be documenting on Numbered Exits in the future, this post concerns a property from a few years ago, the Super 8 in Hope, Arkansas, at a property which is no longer a hotel.¹

I stayed at the Super 8 in July 2024 and found that the address, 2000 Holiday Drive, indicated its pedigree as a former Holiday Inn (though hadn't been one in years at that point). Unfortunately, I can't find hard proof that it was a Holiday Inn or when the changeover happened (no postcards, no newspaper archives, the only thing I really have is that it wasn't listed in the 2002 directory). In 2024 it was a very tired motel, worn down and not much of a breakfast at all, despite a huge dining area. The reviews were pretty bad at the time but it wasn't the worst motel I've stayed in. (Maybe it was at the time, but that record has easily been broken.)

Around 2025 it closed and became a location of The Dels, an Arkansas-based company to provide "sustainable, transient housing throughout Arkansas and the Midwest". I do have a picture of my own room's easy chair (but did not take a picture of the bathroom and its baby blue tiles).

1. Other than the Travelodge in Austin that has since been converted to apartments, I can't think of any hotels I've stayed at where the property isn't being used as a hotel anymore.

Bastrop H-E-B plus! (Bastrop, Texas)

I don't have a picture of H-E-B plus!, this is from Community Impact. Cropped. (Amanda Cutshall)
As of this writing, the Bastrop Highway 71 page will be getting another redo that removes the H-E-B from the list, despite it facing Highway 71 (it has the address of 104 North Hasler Boulevard), and it's worth talking about here.

H-E-B plus! is the de facto supermarket in Bastrop (Albertsons, Kroger, or Randalls was never here) and opened in 2003. The old H-E-B was 50,000 square feet and located directly across from North Hasler. I remember seeing both and thinking that the new H-E-B didn't look much bigger than the old one, but it was a deeper store, with the old store being 50,000 square feet and the new one being 91,000 square feet. In November 2014 it finished an expansion, rebranding it as an H-E-B Plus (at about 119,000 square feet). Ten years later another expansion was announced that would add another 21,000 square feet which would add True Texas BBQ, additional Curbside service, and an expanded tortilla department. BastropTexas.net has pictures of H-E-B when it was brand-new. The clock tower is still there.

Godfather's Pizza (Tillmans Corner, Alabama)

Picture from Google (from Cary Reams, 2026)
I'm afraid I don't have much on this one. This Godfather's Pizza in Tillmans Corner (Mobile), Alabama at 5442 US-90 has been here since at least 1998 but I can't tell what it was before, if anything. (It looks much older inside and out than 1998, but I've been wrong before). Unlike the motel I stayed at nearby (more on that another time, it was probably THE worse motel I've ever stayed in) it didn't suck, and actually pretty decent; it was my first time eating at a Godfather's since December 2002. I do have a picture of my own; it's from my 2025 vacation.

Former Albertsons #2773 (Houston, Texas)

I tried to get a good picture of this store except a combination of dangerous traffic patterns and the whole thing being fenced in have forced me to do differently, so I had to use Bing for this one.
As you may know, I used to run "Safeway and Albertsons in Texas", a short-lived blog describing former and current Albertsons and Safeway stores in Texas, sort of a local version of Acme Style (which recently came back to life!) or Albertsons Florida Blog. Well, it never really took off, to make it "good" would require resources and photos that I really didn't have. Today's post is the Carbon-izer friendly updated version of Former Albertsons #2773 - Houston, TX at 1770 East T.C. Jester Parkway, a post I created almost 10 years ago to the day (7/24/2016).

In that original post, I talked about a lot about why Albertsons failed in Houston, and most of that, I believe, is accurate, but not really relating well as to why that store failed. (I had been told by someone who worked as a merchandiser for Frito-Lay that traffic count was not one of the things Albertsons looked at—some managers also had this particularly bizarre-like obsession with paperwork at the exact same time and signed by the right people, hearing him describe it brought to mind the film Brazil, which I had watched recently at the time).

Albertsons #2773 got the worst of it as it was extremely short-lived, even for Houston Albertsons standards, opening around August 2000 (based on an advertisement on IBC opening inside and lack of listings before) before announcing closing in February 2002 (along with a store at 5620 West Tidwell, which was another awkwardly-located store in a working-class neighborhood).

When I first visited the neighborhood (other than a brief drive-through in the area around 2011) in 2015, I was struck at how difficult it was to navigate the area, between the four-way stop, easy-to-miss driveways, and spending several minutes stopped at one of the nearby roads for a truck to wriggle itself into a company that delivered flowers to florists. The four-way stop suggested the roads didn't see a lot of vehicular traffic, and the Albertsons was built shortly after T.C. Jester was extended between Wynnwood and 18th Street as part of a developer project that also built the apartment complex to the south of the store, meaning that there was almost no data on traffic count before Albertsons went in. There was also the issue of demographics; from 1993 to 1998 you couldn't even get around with side streets as there was a gate between Wynnwood Street and Dian Street due to the differences in the two neighborhoods, citing crime issues. It's very likely that the store took in water during Tropical Storm Allison as well (the nearby Eckerd flooded out and was abandoned for years).

A diagram of Albertsons and its neighbors, both of which have since closed. Kmart is on the upper right.
Around 2004, a large part of the parking lot was removed for a retention pond (likely to prevent flooding) and it became a self storage facility called Heights Self Storage. In spring 2016, this changed to LifeStorage, which later merged with Extra Space Storage, so within a few years it was rebranded to Extra Space Storage.

Days Inn Slidell (Slidell, Louisiana)

I had to resort to using a (cropped) picture from the hotel's official website. It looked like this in 2024 and still does currently.
One of my original intentions of Numbered Exits was to catalog stuff I'd seen on my 2024 road trip to Tennessee, and the last "true" item of that respect, as of this writing, was Piccadilly back in May 2025. One of the things I wanted to cover from the same trip was the Days Inn I stayed at in Slidell.

My stay in Slidell wasn't great as this is where a piece of metal punctured my tire and the hotel wasn't so great either (the door couldn't close all the way and the AC wasn't working correctly as it had to also fight the humidity). From the sky it looks like one large building, it's really two separated by a covered walkway.

Because I don't have many resources afforded to me when it comes to Slidell, the only thing I do know is that this didn't start out as a Days Inn. The 2002 Days Inn hotel directory I have puts Days Inn's Slidell location as it existed circa 2001 was at 1645 Gause, which has since been demolished (around 2006-2007); meanwhile the motel here has been around in the late 1980s and became Days Inn in 2011 (previously "America's Best Inn & Suites), which also came with a minor variation (altering the facade). Beyond that, however, I know nothing about it. It has 57 rooms according to multiple online sources, and here's the current website. A large part of this is the fact that my subscription to Newspapers.com doesn't cover the New Orleans paper (or the Baton Rouge paper, for that matter) so I'm in the dark unless you want to help reach out and solve the mystery...

Caligula XXI (Houston, Texas)

This particular scan is from a 1987 Houston tourism guide I scanned in over a decade ago.
Note: While nothing explicit appears on this page, this post discusses an adult entertainment venue.

I used to have on my big Westheimer Road page a few items that were "close enough" to Westheimer to consider them for inclusion on the page, with one of these items being 2618 Winrock Boulevard. While I also had it later listed on the "Houston Outer Loop" page, this is an expanded version of anything that previously appeared on Carbon-izer.

2618 Winrock is today a strip club (these types of things are soft-banned from Google Maps these days) but the earliest reference I can find is what it actually appears to have been built for, a restaurant called "The Spaghetti Store", an Italian restaurant that opened with a 5-cent beer promotion. Within a few years it closed and reopened in 1978 as Five to Five, a restaurant specializing in late hours (dinner served from 5 pm to 1 am, then breakfast from 1 am to 5 am). In 1979, this was replaced with Maceo's, which soon gave way to Gufini's Italian Restaurant, and in 1980 became "The Long Branch Saloon & Steakhouse", with its themed names for menu items.

"Yes, I'll have the Miss Kitty and the Feed Bag for four." (Houston Chronicle, 05/22/1980)
This closed around the end of 1980. In early 1981, it became what it was (mostly) known for over the course of the next twenty years, Caligula XXI. Even to this day, still holds some architectural features of its original tenant (false embedded columns on the side of the building, originally colored bronze), statues, etc.

I originally posted this ad to a HAIF thread about similar establishments, but the fact that it was endorsed by Penthouse suggests a connection to a film Penthouse founder Bob Guccione produced, Caligula, an erotic film on the eponymous Roman Emperor, notorious for both his unmatched hedonism and cruelty (as well as nearly bankrupting the Roman Empire). When the Houston Chronicle first started running ads for Caligula XXI, it mentioned that it featured "authentic Greek delicacies" to "make your lunch a true culinary delight".

In the summer of 1981, they ran a schedule of what was going on all week. This is verbatim.

Monday is the toga party. Tuesday is sexy western day and Wednesday is the pajama party (wow, what pajamas). Thursday is oldies but goodies with those naughty but nice costumes of the 50's along with 50's music. Friday is kinky day (just imagine what happens this day). Saturday is the all night go go and Sunday is burlesque night.

In 2002 Caligula XXI was replaced with "The Penthouse Club" (another Penthouse connection!) was here from 2002 to 2012, and Vivid Gentlemen's Club operated from 2012 to 2025. The current operator is "The Vault" since late 2025.