Greenspoint Mall (Houston, Texas)

The mall sprawled out with six department stores. (2010) Opening in August 1976 and closing in August 2024, Greenspoint Mall has been discussed several places, not the least of which has been the Carbon-izer page which goes over the history and features a map of when it opened, as well as other links. Until the year 1998, Greenspoint Mall, despite a deteriorating reputation, was one of the largest malls (if not the largest) in the area with six department stores—Sears, Foley's, Dillard's, JCPenney, Mervyn's, and Montgomery Ward. Within a decade the mall would look very different...

Highland 10 (Austin, Texas)

Google Earth Street View 2019 Straight from Carbon-izer.com comes Galaxy Theatres Austin at 6700 Middle Fiskville Road. On the other side of the Burlington/former Wal-Mart is this movie theater, has been open since 1988 (except for a short period in 2000-2001). The 2005 picture of the theater at Cinematreasures is out of date; it's simply branded as "Galaxy Theatres" these days. (It's 2005 based on the movies showing.) If you visit the "Photos" page on Cinematreasures you can also see a picture of it at night in 2006 (sadly, it looks far less colorful today), where it was one of the relatively few theaters that showed Idiocracy.

For a long time I had believed it was just another movie theater I read about but never actually been to, a recent discovery of a ticket stub from Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace proved otherwise (and to think, that was in its original form). I still don't remember it, though.

There are also tenants built around the cinema with the same address, like Taj Palace (closed late 2021), which has been here since 1990 (though jumped spaces within the center).

Hi Nabor Jones Creek (St. George, Louisiana)

On one of my other sites, Exor's Dungeon (a part of Carbon-izer), I may have mentioned that it was the Baton Rouge area when I visited family and really got acquainted with Nintendo, with stuff like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 but there was usually still the rest of the house to visit, and that included newspaper circulars. Enter Hi Nabor, one of the Baton Rouge independent grocery stores that still persists today.

I really like these pictures (from Supermarket & Hypermarket Design 2, though I believe the store opened in the early-to-mid 1980s) because the original Hi Nabor logo (or at least as it existed at this point in time) can't be found anywhere; it's the newer one that appeared in the late 2000s that is far more common. So it is nice on the nostalgia end.

The address is 5383 Jones Creek Rd, Baton Rouge, LA 70817 and as you can see it has had some updates since Street View started in 2007.

I've listed the city as "St. George" in the title, however, because it was never in Baton Rouge's city limits but is now in the limits of the newly-incorporated St. George.

Whistle Junction (Orlando, Florida)

The squished ad is the paper's fault, not mine. Located on 5350 International Drive, this restaurant was built in 2004 and has gone under a variety of different names. The first restaurant that was here opened in May 2004 as Whistle Junction, a buffet restaurant and by January 2008 was Jerrod's Black Angus Steakhouse. In early 2008, Jerrod's closed for "Gol! The Taste of Brazil" before being quickly rebranded to Nelore Churrascaria, a Brazilian steakhouse. By 2011, it was Matteo's of Orlando (an outpost of the NY restaurant), which closed in 2012. The current tenant, Hash House A Go Go, opened April 2013.

Burger King on Interstate 35 (Waco, Texas)

Unknown source—if it was Loopnet it's not there now. Located at 1500 N. Interstate 35, this restaurant was built and opened in 1991 as a Burger King and closed at YE 2019 or early 2020 based on my estimations. After renovations, it re-opened as the Waco original "Hawk's Hot Chicken" in early 2021 but it closed around fall 2022.

As Hawk's the building was modified but you can immediately see one of the problems of the new restaurant with Street View; construction of I-35 cut off their main access.

Jakes Burgers opened a year after the demise of Hawk's. (Adapted and expanded from Carbon-izer.com).

Super Isingtec (Houston, Texas)

Street View as of 2016 10839 Bellaire Boulevard was built in 2000 as an Eckerd (on the site of an old Shell station dating back to the mid-1970s) but CVS wasn't interested in the site, converting it but closing it by fall 2004.

From 2005 to around 2009 this was Advance Auto Parts, which, unusually, featured Chinese characters on the signage! Around late 2014, Isingtec (moved from 11360 Bellaire) opened as "Super Isingtec". Super Isingtec, which apparently, was not a pun on "surprising tech", operated here until around 2020. The place certainly looked interesting, with a color scheme of lime green and orange (see the Yelp page), featuring "FURNITURE • APPLIANCES • MATTRESS • KARAOKE" (one of these is not like the others)...but the reality was mostly just a furniture store (nothing "super-ising"). Isingtec still has two locations in Garland, TX and Duluth, GA.

In 2021, it was renovated into a new strip center building ("Bellaire Crest"), with "The Hotpot Ice Cream" being one of the first tenants. By June 2024 Hotpot had turned into M Saigon Street Food (same ownership, apparently), with the other tenants being Lotus Pharmacy and Medical & Eye Clinic, as well as Tot Nail Supply.

This entry was originally featured on Carbon-izer.

Navasota South of 105 (Navasota, Texas)

Google Maps Street View, c. 2013 Following the last exit in Navasota, Highway 6 continuing south becomes a divided highway rather than a freeway. I must say there's not much in this direction. There's Schulte Roofing Company (10842 Hwy. 6 Bypass South) that built a permanent location here in 2006. There's a bridge that goes over railroad tracks, which was the site of a derailment in 2014. Most of the news content I can find for this one (including a video) focused mostly on the spill of diethanolamine but it also damaged the bridge structure; it was down to one lane northbound for several weeks. On the west side there's a church, Faith Outreach Christian Center (11596 Hwy. 6), with the east side holding the facility of Trinity Heads Inc. (11765 Hwy. 6 South). Trinity Heads manufactures pressure vessel heads and, according to their website, was first built in the late 1950s as "Tru-Weld Co." with the current name being assumed in 2001 after expanding over the years. (The rail spur is often in use).

Further south is Hilco Metal Roof Supply & Services (12503 Hwy. 6), J5 Tractors (2476 Highway 6), and finally the point where the bypass rejoins with LaSalle Street. The southern-most business of the Highway 6 bypass. When heading north, the southside split of Highway 6 is a welcome sight after long distances of driving out in the countryside back north (hello dual signs proclaiming Business 6 is to the left), and in my time driving back from Houston there used to be a large clump of cactus growing in the highway shoulder. Going south, though, there's a narrow bridge ahead, with a crossover road that used to be just north of the Navasota River but it closed in the late 2010s.

From there we continue south, with the only real changes since the early 2000s are some restructuring of the crossover lanes (safer but fewer of them) and a May 2016 tornado that took out some trees and buildings, namely a barn that was already halfway collapsing and damage to Global Vacuum Systems. There's Grassy Creek Community (trailer park) near CR-317 and the aforementioned Global Vacuum Systems Inc. (15431 State Highway 6) which manufactures This facility manufactures vacuum tanks for trucks. It was built in 2008 but the 2016 tornado did major damage to the facility, destroying a 2011 building (the paint shop) and causing major damage to the roof of the main building.

At FM 1227/CR-318 there's blinking lights now and St. Holland Missionary Baptist Church (15898 Hwy. 6). I'm not sure of the building on the southeast side of the intersection but a sign points toward WildFlyer Mead Company (may be covered in a future post), a little further more down is Rosa's Plants, Pots & More (16157 Hwy. 6) and then we get to the FM 2 intersection, which will be covered at yet another time...

Grand Rios Indoor Water Park Hotel (Brooklyn Park, Minnesota)

The hotel with the waterpark addition in 2012 (Google Earth)
Seeing as you can't add comments to the original post anymore, I wanted to expand on a post I saw many years ago on a now-defunct site called Dumpy Strip Malls—the Wordpress version of the site still remains but many of the posts were lost. Not lost totally, however, some of them are on Archive.org like the one on Grand Rios Water Park in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The blog covers the sorry state of the hotel as it was in 2012, and within a few years it was indeed torn down for a CarMax.

From what I can find the 224 room hotel opened back in the mid-1970s (first phase open in November 1974) as Sheraton Inn Northwest and featured a number of amenities, with a 24-hour coffee shop, meeting and banquet rooms, and a large indoor swimming pool and other features (no doubt cloned from Holiday Inn's "Holidome"). The original room count at least when it first opened was 140 rooms.

The hotel changed hands a few times, becoming Best Western Northwest Inn in 1990, then "Northwest Inn" in 1999 before becoming a Ramada in 2001. In 2003 a local businessman bought the hotel to transform into a waterpark-based hotel, which seemed to work for a slumping tourist economy and would have the largest indoor waterpark in Minnesota. While it was announced that the hotel would be Four Points by Sheraton (the new name of Sheraton Inn adopted in the 1990s, bringing back the hotel full circle). When the hotel reopened, however, there were differences, the first being it had no seemingly hotel chain affiliation (now known as Grand Rios Indoor Water Park Hotel, though Ramada remained on the road sign) and while it had three restaurants, Beach House Bar & Grill, Soggy Dollar Cafe, and Coconut Charley's, Coconut Charley's served "All American items" rather than the Caribbean restaurant originally promised.

Now you know the rest of the story—it doesn't do well, gets poor reviews, and it's gone within a decade...

Krystal of West Memphis (West Memphis, Arkansas)

Google Maps Street View Located in the parking lot of the defunct Holiday Plaza Mall, this Krystal was built in 2004 (per county records)...but there was something else prior to that currently unknown at the moment.

I ate here on my vacation and took a few photos.

Urban Air Waco (Waco, Texas)

Source: Google Maps Street View I'm not feeling up to an "original" post today (we'll make it up), so here's another import from the the existing "Other Waco Roads" page, Urban Air Trampoline Park at 5701 W. Waco Drive. The address had been alternately/erroneously listed as 5800 W. Waco Drive when it was a Best Buy from 1993 to 2004 (moved out to the Marketplace shopping center). In 2007 it became GymX (before it moved to the old Linens 'n Things building). It became an indoor trampoline park by fall 2015.

The Home Depot in Waco (Waco, Texas)

Courtesy Newspapers.com As part of mopping up the existing "Other Waco Roads" page, today we're covering Waco's first Home Depot store at 5605 W. Waco Drive. The Home Depot opened in March 2000. The property was cut out from Central Freight Lines to the north, and access is from Centerpoint Drive, which was signalized around 2000 (also providing better access to what was at the time Mervyn's and Toys R Us).

Ingles in Farragut (Farragut, Tennessee)

Author's picture, July 2024 This Ingles (around 97k square feet) was built in 2008 to replace a smaller nearby store (35k square feet). The store was great; some good bakery options (half price on donuts after hours) and a bulk section but the center store was rather pricey. Guess you get what you pay for. I took some pictures of things I found interesting, including a convenience store-like counter for the deli, the difference between "Kids Cereal" and "Adult Cereal", and a few others.

The Ingles replaced Farragut Towne Square Cinema 10, which operated from 1993 to 2005. Ingles Market #91 is located at 11847 Kingston Pike in Farragut, Tennessee.

Village Flowery and Wagner Hardware (Houston, Texas)

I couldn't get a good shot of Wagner Hardware. (2013 Street View). I titled this post the way as it was these two businesses on the 6100 block of Kirby that imprinted on me and those two businesses kept those names between 1989 and 2010. The first one, the current River Oaks Plant House which I best remember as Village Flowery (after all, it had that name for about 25 years) goes back to the mid-1960s when Tom Payne Typewriter Co. moved to 6125 Kirby from 6103 Kirby as by 1966 a new restaurant out of California that had begun fast expanding in California and the Southwest was built...Jack in the Box. Sometime around the mid-1980s the restaurant closed (relocating to 5114 Kirby Drive) and by 1989, Village Flowery was operating out of the space. It had common ownership with River Oaks Plant House, a garden center operating at 3401 Westheimer Road. For over the next twenty years the two garden centers operated in their respective parts of town. However, in late 2013, River Oaks Plant House got kicked out of its old location at 3401 Westheimer Road, and as a result, they simply rebranded Village Flowery to River Oaks Plant House (despite not being near River Oaks anymore).

The other building was Wagner Hardware. When it began construction of a building fronting Kirby in May 1948, it already had been a known name moving from the Rice Village area, and after completing the building, continued to operate for the next 60 years. That all started to change in 2009, when it introduced a store-within-a-store for eco-friendly products called "New Living". Not too long after, the store changed hands and the store was remerchandised and rebranded to the "New Living" concept.Most of the hardware lines were dropped for furniture and mattresses in addition to paint, and in 2014, New Living dismantled the old Wagner Hardware sign above the store. Between 2015 and 2017, New Living refocused from "sustainable design and furniture" to simply "organic mattresses". I'm not sure how the transition between New Living and Houston Natural Mattress (the similar replacement tenant) occurred, but it happened between October 2019 and March 2020. They seem to have different phone numbers. (This post is adopted from something on Carbon-izer.com, but removed in a later update. Street View here).

Shoney's on Donelson Pike (Nashville, Tennessee)

Photo by author, 7/24 When it came to "try new restaurants" on my big trip, Shoney's was on that list, and the Shoney's at 546 Donelson Pike was the one I ended up going to.

It was "Flavor Fiesta" that day (or in layman's terms, Taco Tuesday) but I stayed with the traditional stuff, getting only two modest plates, one composing of pork chops, mac-n-cheese (would've preferred potatoes but they were out), vegetables, and a few rolls (I do enjoy bread), the other salad and canned fruit.

The oldest reference I can find is that this Shoney's was here in 1977 and rebuilt at some point in the 1990s for reasons unknown. Also, note the Buick Reatta in the parking lot; there's not too many of those around.

Neat.

Carpet, Texas (Jersey Village, Texas)

"The Super Floor Store" as of c. 2011 With the page on the fast food restaurants restored on Carbon-izer, they weren't the only victims of 290 near Beltway 8. Another building, visible from the freeway easily, was a large green-roofed warehouse known as "Carpet, Texas" when opened in February 2001 at 15815 Northwest Freeway (though the advertisement has its old location at 14900 Hempstead). It closed in 2010 but was soon picked up and reopened by Jack's Carpet with the same bunch of logos below it. Unfortunately, this only lasted a few years before it was closed in 2012 (along with most of the other Jack's Carpet stores, though the Webster store still operates). There's some more pictures on Google Maps Street View (if you can fiddle around to get to the pre-2014 configuration) and on Carbon-izer servers, an older shot when they still did 3D views. (This was adapted from this page on Carbon-izer.com).

Albertsons Texarkana (Texarkana, Arkansas)

This is how the Albertsons appeared in 2013 per Google. I don't have my own picture, it was overcast and I was losing daylight fast. In what was perhaps the strangest state line crossing I have ever encountered, I turned left on State Line Road into Albertsons #611 (that's the store number today and I don't know if it was ever changed) at 3710 N. State Line Avenue, Texarkana, AR 71854. Tax records indicate the 64,793 square foot store was built in 1974 as Skaggs Albertsons and some newspaper archives from Shreveport do in fact indicate this became Skaggs Alpha Beta by the 1980s before its brief time as Jewel-Osco and finally getting renamed as Albertsons in 1992.

Given the fact that the exterior got a facelift sometime around 2015-2016 I'm assuming that's the last time the interior was updated though there seemed to be construction on flooring on my visit. My photos are below.

This is about what H-E-B charges, but does H-E-B have miniature versions?

A clean, bright store.

The flooring's torn up here.

All real soft drink brands as far as the eye can see.

Can't say Sunkist Orange Diet is very common.

No card required but added anyway.