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.

Texian Inn of Waco (Waco, Texas)

This picture is from Agoda.com, taken sometime in the 2000s or early 2010s.
Our Waco coverage coverage continues. While we previously discussed this at Carbon-izer.com, those items are being moved to Numbered Exits.

In reality, Texian Inn (at 115 Jack Kultgen Expressway) was demolished several years ago in the late 2010s and the place where I grabbed the picture from, Agoda.com, seems to have numerous other photos that clearly were not from the same hotel. Texian Inn opened in March 1985 to great fanfare as the hotel chain spread throughout Texas and beyond (they mention that at least one hotel opened outside the state with that name, though I can only confirm Albuquerque and Oklahoma City), with the hotel celebrating one year of business in March 1986. They opened a few in the major Texas cities, and even one in College Station. Within five years, the chain had folded and the motels were sold off (the College Station one, with the Waco one becoming Lexington Inn around 1990, Americas Best Value Inn in the early 2000s, and finally Executive Inn & Suites (around 2015-2016) before being torn down in 2017. Soon after, the Jack in the Box next to it (connected to the parking lot), which had been there next to the motel's entire lifespan, was also torn down. (The restaurant operated from around 1984 to late 2017).

Unlike the College Station Texian Inn it at least kept its original stone facade to the end.

The replacement SpringHill Suites by Marriott was under construction in 2019 and opened in the early 2020s.

UPDATE 05-17-2026: Added address, removed 7-Eleven/Arby's mention