Albertsons at Kings Crossing (Houston, Texas)

The former Albertson/H-E-B, sitting empty. (Picture by Mike A., 2024).
The following article is a split from the original The Grocery Heart of Kings Crossing article at Houston Historic Retail (I traded with another article I wrote on H-E-B Pantry in the Heights). As of this writing the original post is still there. The photos however, aren't mine—they're from Mike of HHR.

The first grocery store to be built at the intersection of Kingwood Drive and West Lake Houston Parkway was Holiday Foods, which anchored the Kings Crossing shopping center. It opened in April 1985 as a 45,000-square-foot store. Holiday Foods was a new chain, having been split off from the Minimax co-op and Fleming less than a year prior (see HHR's page on Minimax). There aren't any pictures of what the Kingwood Holiday Foods looked like; however, based on aerial photos of the shape of the store, it almost certainly looked like their Santa Fe store spread over a larger footprint.

Holiday Foods would operate for the next decade (even as a massive Randalls opened in 1992 across the intersection) and outlived all the other locations of the small chain. In February 1995, Frank and Sam Glass, the owners of the store, announced that they would switch to being IGA-affiliated. (I assume the ad announcing as such was supposed to be Wednesday, March 1. By the end of April, however, the store was liquidating the last of its fixtures. What likely happened was that despite Holiday Foods cutting ties with Minimax, they didn't cut ties with Fleming, who owned the store itself, and thus when Holiday Foods tried to go with IGA, Fleming reacted. Over the next two years, the building would sit vacant, and Albertsons, who was looking to expand in the area, purchased it.

Albertsons assigned its stores numbers, by this point its pre-existing Houston-area stores had gotten the 27xx numbering, and while its numbering suggests it should've opened in 1997, it wasn't opened until a few years later. The new Albertsons wasn't in the original Holiday Foods; it was demolished, along with the Eckerd next door, to allow for a much larger, fancier supermarket on the site of the old store, and opened the modern 60,000 square foot store in January 2001. Just about 15 months later, Albertsons announced it was pulling out of the Houston market with its stores to be sold or closed. The Kingwood store was one of four stores to be purchased by H-E-B and reopened later that year.¹

H-E-B was building its own full-size stores in Houston around this time with some unfortunately tacky designs with the former Albertsons looking much nicer, and in my opinion, the Kingwood store was the best looking of all of them (by extension, the entire H-E-B chain). In 2016, H-E-B relocated to the northeast side of the intersection where Kings Crossings Apartments used to be (more on that later), building a far larger store that they owned rather than sharing a shopping center with other tenants.

Looking at the other tenants, they're a fairly standard mix of typical strip tenants. The center itself² received a facelift in 2022 the rest of the center received a facelift, mostly changing the ridged concrete facades (like what Kmart used to have) to stucco and some new construction (it also changed an old leasing requirement about only using all-white signage). Going down the list as of 2024 from the former Albertsons / H-E-B we have Trek Bicycle (4311, formerly the home of Sylvan Learning prior to 2019), Hallmark Gold Crown (4313), Domino's (4319), PostNet (4321), the new location of Sylvan Learning (4323), Hunan Garden Express (4325), Ann's Teahouse (4327)⁴, The Flying Biscuit Cafe (4329), Parry's Pizzeria & Taphouse (4331)⁵, Pet Ranch (4411), Club Champion (4417), Yonutz (4421), S&A Nails (4423), H&R Block (4425), Subway (4427), Lynn Tailoring (4429), Next Level Urgent Care - Kingwood (4435), and Walgreens (4445). The Walgreens opened in 2000 to functionally replace the old Eckerd; the original tenant was a Crafts Etc. store.

But what of the former Albertsons? In April 2026, a Sprouts Farmers Market opened as part of an expansion in Houston (a few years after closing some locations in the Houston area that weren't working). It uses the address but not all the space.

While I don't have any pictures of the center, there are a few other pictures of the former Albertsons/H-E-B specifically. (H-E-B tore out much of Albertsons' decor).

1. The only store of this type to remain as an H-E-B is at Kempwood and Gessner with their Clear Lake store closing in 2021 for a modern store and their Pasadena store being converted to Mi Tienda.
2. The best I can find is this one that touts the redevelopment of the center, likely created around 2022, when the center received a facelift renovation, here and archived here on Carbon-izer.) It doesn't help that the former Randalls center is also apparently called "Kings Crossing" (archive), but this seems to be entirely different ownership).
3. The PDF previously linked indicates that there was to be a tailor between the former Albertsons and Trek Bicycle but it didn't seem to be there in reality, there's no door for it.
4. This part of the strip center was one of the sections reconfigured. Previously this address was used for Famous Footwear, which faced south.
5. The original 4331, Hunan Garden, was located in the demolished section. It closed in 2021 (not 2025, look at the bottom of the article).

Cedar City Neon Sign Company (Cedar City, Utah)

Don't be fooled by the dusty, exterior front, the real prize is in the back.
I stumbled across Cedar City Neon Sign Company while looking at Cedar City, Utah and its diverging diamond interchange as seen in this Road Guy Rob video. It's not much...it's at 563 North Airport Road and looks to have been located here for years. It's got a "sign graveyard" in the back (clearly visible from Google Street View with the older Chevron and Shell signs I like. (Sparkle Sign Company in Houston used to offer a similar sort of thing but it looks like a change in ownership "cleaned up" the lot). I'm not sure if they offer tours but it looks fun.

Bagby Quik Pak (Waco, Texas)

Picture courtesy MCAD from 2003. As I continue to change things around in Carbon-izer, it's time for another Waco story (originally seen on this page). Quik Pak opened its gas station and convenience store at 5601 Bagby Avenue and Loop 340 sometime around 1997-1998 when this was a somewhat isolated area, and I have fond memories of the store being here (looking like the picture above) from when the way to get to my grandfather's new house (he lived in Waco before, but he moved over five miles away as I got to see a different side of Bagby Avenue en route to the new place, an emptier, newer side, as it was before the major developments Central Texas Marketplace or Legends Crossing, or reconstructing the interchange at I-35. By late 2007, it was a Chevron/CEFCO. Quik Pak had switched brands to Chevron by 2006 (when Citgo pulled out of Waco) and they sold most of their stores to CEFCO that year. (1702 West Spring Valley Road was the exception and was sold later).

In December 2021, CEFCO opened a new store at 6201 Bagby Avenue less than a mile away. By early 2026, this was Waco's first Casey's, while Casey's has kept this CEFCO here for now (likely staying as such since it's a smaller store).

Barton Springs Road McDonald's (Austin, Texas)

Picture by author, February 2023 (cropped)
One of the things I mentioned on Carbon-izer and took out to focus on South Lamar Boulevard was a building that was on the corner of South Lamar and Barton Springs (but had a Barton Springs address), the Barton Springs McDonald's at 1209 Barton Springs Road. This operated from 1979 to 2022 and was the original building (the metallic roof came sometime around 2003-2005, when those sorts of buildings were being upgraded before their demolition). In 2022 it abruptly closed and was expected to be rebuilt (as this sort of thing was quite dated by that time), especially as the Golden Arches remained with the old "Billions and Billions Served" signage.

The restaurant was demolished in early 2023 with the sign going last. Much speculation has been on Reddit and its enigmatic owner, the "State of Texas Youth Council" which appears to be nothing than the owner of the land at 1209 Barton Springs Road.

Brittany Place (Houston, Texas)

I removed Brittany Place at 2338 West 18th Street from Carbon-izer back in 2025 when I reformatted the "Inner Loop" page, but it deserves another look (what with the new direction of Numbered Exits versus Carbon-izer). While it is alive and well today, it was described as "Country French Provincial" when construction began in fall 1969, with the 240-unit apartment complex stretching several blocks along West 18th Street but not very deep. The images here are from a 1970 advertisement article, but there's really not much more I can say about other than fond memories of driving down West 18th Street for the first time back in early 2015 when I was out and exploring Houston by myself for the first time.

McDonald's at WestBank Market (Austin, Texas)

Picture by author, Feb. 2023
Just less than hour before this article went to press, I had been sure that the Randalls located at WestBank Market, a shopping center at 3300 Bee Caves Road, was an AppleTree, and I had pictures of said AppleTree from Market Supermarket & Hypermarket Design. It turned out, however, that the Randalls was NOT that AppleTree and it was at 3229 Bee Caves Road. Instead, the Randalls was a rebranded Tom Thumb-Page (#77) from 1989 and I don't have many good photos of it except maybe the exterior. While there is of course, a PDF I'd like to focus on instead the McDonald's at the shopping center. Unique-looking McDonald's stores are a rarity these days and I'm sure this has been updated at least once since its 1989 opening, but it's still a cool restaurant. This is from 2023, at a time when most of these places were gone. Additional pictures, also from February 2023, below.

The Real Superstore (Lafayette, Louisiana)

Courtesy The Daily Advertiser of Lafayette (Newspapers.com).
In a bit of a course reversal since around last October, no longer will this alternate between "directory breakup" posts and "new" posts. However, this post is still similar to older ones in that it exports a stand-alone post originally made on Carbon-izer.com, Lafayette's The Real Superstore, a large supermarket in Lafayette, Louisiana that operated between 1985 and 1996 (apart from a brief closure in 1995). It's since been replaced with a movie theater known as The Grand Lafayette today.