IronTiger

But...I had already started my own version hosted on my own site (linked in my quote) that has a lot more information. I'm missing 5, 9, 16, 44-46, and the exact address for 55. I don't know where I read that 55 was in fact Humble, probably a newspaper or yellow pages, but that begs the question of why I don't have the address. Chronologically it fits, all the numbering of Randalls is subsequent up until they were bought by Safeway. (Look at the numbering, notice how they start accelerating in the 1980s starting with #11 in 1980 and going up to #48 by the end of the decade, then dries up by 1994, so much so that they skip 1995, and only open about five more before being sold to Safeway). http://www.carbon-izer.com/retail/albertsons/randalls.html

There was a guy called Michael Pollack that did commercials for (what was then) Colonial House in Gulfgate. I don't know if Galleria Club had anything, it was a fairly modestly sized apartment complex.

That sounds like it might be a liability. Then again, I've heard stories of all sorts of strange restaurants with concepts that wouldn't fly today (and dubious back then).

A little more research shows that Galleria Club never changed names and opened in 1977. How were "roofs falling in" in a decade?

Huh, why didn't it work out? I guess the owner just didn't want to invest in it to try to rebuild. Also, Arby's is a peculiar choice since a number of Arby's restaurants built in the late 1990s/early 2000s have largely bitten the dust. I'd say half a dozen have closed in the Houston area in the last five years.

I went to Evans Library at Texas A&M University the other day to get some microfilms from the Houston Post. While my find wasn't nearly as fruitful as I wanted it to be I did find an interesting article from July 1988 (Houston Post) about the way some apartment complexes were fighting back instead of just dropping rents. The article is below, but in my analysis of them some of them just didn't stick. Two of them seem to have done all right but the other two have gone down the tubes. Address: 5450 Timber Creek Place Old Name: Oaks of Timber Creek Apartments 1988 Name: St. Gregory's Beach Status Today: It's still known as St. Gregory's Beach, with the distinctly 1980s signage still in place. The cabana built during the renovation is still up, though it seems it no longer has sand. The apartment complex has been more adequately maintained than others but it may have gotten flooded during Harvey. Address: 17050 Imperial Valley Drive Old Name: Woodvalley Apartments 1988 Name: The Hollywood Status Today: Seems the late 1980s turnaround didn't stick, and today it is Biscayne at Cityview Apartments, and it's just as bad as the other Greenspoint apartment complexes. Probably flooded in 2016. Address: 8162 Richmond Avenue Old Name: ???? 1988 Name: Galleria Club Status Today: Turtle Pointe Apartments, seems to have made little updates since the 1980s and has bad reviews. Address: 5675 Purple Sage Old Name: ???? 1988: Hunters Creek Status Today: Kept name (that's a good sign) and has mixed reviews.

This building is near Memorial City Mall and is a strip center with two tenants, Office Depot and Sports Authority. Sports Authority went out of business last year, and when Sports Authority moved in around 2005 (maybe 2004) it was Service Merchandise (which either closed in 1999 or 2002). Office Depot has been there since at least 1988 (as per the Houston Post--and given that Office Depot was founded two years prior in Florida, it hadn't been there for very long), and the Service Merchandise was there since 1985 at least since it converted Wilson's, a catalog showroom out of Baton Rouge. However, the building was there since 1973 and HCAD lists it as a "discount warehouse store" in terms of the building type. It's possible when it was converted from Wilson's, Service Merchandise downscaled (Wilson's had a lot of lines that Service Merchandise didn't sell, it was said that more than half of the inventory Wilson's sold wasn't compatible with Service Merchandise's model), but the building is around 80,000 square feet, which seems right for a discount grocery warehouse store or something similar. Was there anything here pre-dating Wilson's, or did Service Merchandise sub-lease the space to Office Depot, which also seems plausible?

It would also have to be elevated the entire way, as there were far too many crossings on Katy Freeway to make commuter rail safe. Just for fun, I did a quick head count of the railroad crossings (road, crossover, private) as they would have appeared in 1997 10 miles out from 610 on both I-10 and US-290. Both would be a little past Beltway 8. US-290 had 18. Katy Freeway had 28. Considering that one of the proposals from residents around the freeway wanted a depressed freeway partially due to noise concerns, an elevated rail right next to their houses wouldn't have gone over smoothly either.

Amazon had a list of arbitrary things they wanted like mass transit, highly qualified people, etc. but placing Houston behind Detroit doesn't make sense. Detroit as a city is under a million people, and the combined MSA two and a half million people short of Houston's. They built a light rail, I think, along with their theme park ride around downtown, and neither of them is as useful as the Houston light rail system, which is quite functional in comparison, and if we're talking rail mass transit, Austin's is a joke. Additionally, Detroit doesn't have an educated population base, and isn't particularly diverse either at 83% black, unless you were one of those types that read "diversity" explicitly as "non-white", in which case Detroit would fit that, yes.

We've had the Katy Freeway/rail discussion many times, but to get off rail politics and explaining all what actually happened, what people often fail to account for in the Katy Freeway railway was that it was incompatible with the way that everything around was set up. It was set up so that it paralleled outbound traffic, and when the train routinely blocked off crossings, people couldn't turn right on frontage roads, which backed them up, which caused slowdown on the highway. Northwest Freeway doesn't have this problem for several reasons: 1) The railroad is on the inbound side. 2) The railroad is only near the freeway outer loop 3) Outer Belt US-290 wasn't nearly as developed as Outer Belt I-10 was in the 1990s It's also a common misconception that the Katy Tollway was "designed" for rail. It is true that they were designed to potentially be converted to rail use, but it was never in the plans. The reason it came about to be that METRO was even allowed a voice in the construction of the Katy Freeway because the original HOV lanes used federal funding, and the resulting legal stuff of that let METRO have a say in the construction, and METRO decided to dump a bunch of money into over-engineering the center tollway lanes so it could be converted to rail use somewhere down the line even though there was never a guarantee to do so. (Ironically, this waste of money probably screwed over Inner Loop rail funding more than Culberson ever did). edit: outer loop -> outer belt

The Chron archives tell me that the Greenspoint renovation happened in 1988 (April to October). @hydeaway is almost certainly the person who wrote the DeadMalls.com article, and 1988 was when the trees and fountains disappeared and the floors were replaced with "almost glow in the dark multicolored tiles" rather than the dark brick-like tiles it used to have. It was Federated that opened the mall in the 1970s and built the two expansions that would add Joske's and Montgomery Ward to the mall, but it was Prudential Insurance Co. (or rather a pension fund that Prudential ran) that was the one to run Greenspoint into the ground, with the decline happening under their reign and a single 1988 renovation that somehow made the mall worse. In terms of the cafe, at about 4:35 of this video you can see the skylights of the center court with a kiosk (Houston Visitor's Center) protruding into the court, with a white wall above it. However, according to the aerial photograph of said center court, you should be able to see the skylight from any corner, as they go all the way to the end, if you look at the center court from above on Google Earth (it is on the side opposite where they peak outward). Since I have no idea what the café area looked like since I was born after 1988 (1991, thank you) I have come to the rudimentary conclusion that based on the video, the aerial photos, and the old photo, that the café (which I still don't know the name of) was on the side closest to Sears and Joske's, and the 1988 renovation tore down the stairs and walled up what was left, explaining why you can't see the other end of where the two skylight sides meet.

If I'm connecting the dots right, is that what @sheeats is up to these days?

Right, but at the time they opened they were not part of the same company. I'd also bet that the Bealls of 1982 was originally planned as a Battlestein's.

It looks like Battlestein's was purchased by Bealls as early as the late 1970s, with the downtown store closed in 1980. Most of the Bealls stores in Texas are pretty dowdy today, but Bealls merged with Palais Royal in 1992, and it looks like a lot of the Bealls stores in Houston were eventually closed or rebranded, with the last one in San Jacinto Mall, which also had a Palais Royal (likely predating it).

I wouldn't know about Houstonia's prospects, but selling a monthly magazine with a limited demographic focus in this day and age is either a lucky shot that filled a void or someone's pet project that makes little to no profit.

The Houston Press is ending? But where will I find my smutty backpage ads for strip clubs and sex lines now? (In all seriousness, I'm a little surprised it's the Houston Press kicking the bucket first instead of the 2013-founded Houstonia magazine)

I was aware that the department stores all had (originally) upper levels, much like the situation at Memorial City Mall (except for Target). The "upper level café" is new information to me, though, and I don't think I've ever seen a set of stairs in the center courts. I'm going to guess that it was removed in the renovation in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and the space walled up. Without a floorplan or being there it's a little hard to tell, but this walled up area near the skylights sure looks suspicious... EDIT: It is not the same court, but the correct court with the fountains and correct columns still seem to lack a staircase...

I found this in a Texas Monthly ad from 1982 while I was looking for something else: https://books.google.com/books?id=CC4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=magnamart+san+antonio&source=bl&ots=jlX0dLkUwF&sig=zj7TJP5TB_oKHjQE3WqOJEpB2ic&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiR_bKS7t_XAhVB8IMKHU6eDRIQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&q&f=false (The name and logo of Greenspoint were located under it, so it is Greenspoint). The presence of the stairs is intriguing, I thought Greenspoint was only one level.

The information on US-290's history is actually derived from Houston Freeways, which I would call require reading on Houston's history ([url=http://dallasfreeways.com/dfwfreeways/pdf/CH4_spokes_pp184-271_72.pdf]"The Spokes" chapter, which includes a picture of the 1965 setup...page 99 of the PDF[/url]). The book includes when the frontage roads were added, and mentions that the frontage roads for US-290's original right of way had been built out to Cy-Fair High School, even in the 1960s! You're not crazy...the Northwest Freeway stub from the highway terminated near Mangum for years, but Hempstead Highway had been upgraded with a divided frontage road also during that time. The highway wasn't even contiguous until 1975, and the "freeway" as we know it wasn't even done until the late 1970s and early 1980s, and that was just the part inside Beltway 8. With slow development like that, you can tell why even in 2003 it seemed like near Beltway 8 was the "real" start of Houston!

In 1967, the interchange would've already been built but would've just terminated at the frontage roads and ended at Mangum (as of January 1965), much like 225 and 610 today. Big interchange...quickly goes to frontage roads...ends at another road and not at a right angle. The highway between Mangum and Beltway 8 didn't exist, but the frontage roads from roughly where Beltway 8 is (and beyond) had been upgraded to a divided highway with a large median, because planners had predicted that urbanization would come fast and quick to Northwest Houston. It really didn't...there was plenty of activity along Interstate 10 heading west out of town toward Katy, but even in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it still felt that you didn't really reach the "Houston" area until around FM 1960. (This is of course, no longer true.) If the platting map is correct, Brookhollow of Houston had it replatted to its current state before selling it to Humble. I just remembered that despite my scan of Houston Today I got from another source is quite garbage when it comes to the Brookhollow map unfortunately but I did remember to take a picture of the page with my phone, seen here. The striped area is the hotel (Sheraton, but a Marriott in the 1980s), and that seems to confirm that maybe what happened is that Brookhollow bought the land, and redrew the plats to the future tenants of the business park, which were then actually sold to them.

Alright, now that I've got more resources I can start piecing together everything. There were three "Jamail" stores, the first was Jamail & Sons on Kirby (the legendary grocery store that closed in the mid-1990s), Jamail Family Market on South Rice Avenue (described as "7-Eleven sized"), and the Jamail's supermarkets in Woodlands and Kingwood. Randalls bought the Woodlands stores in the late 1980s but not the Kingwood store, which had operated as Holiday Foods and is now Gold's Gym at 2213 Northpark. One of the Woodlands stores was at 4775 W. Panther Creek Drive, which is NOT the Randalls store there today. The Jamail's there became Randalls but Randalls moved to a larger store WITHIN the same shopping center in 1992, with the old store becoming Sears Hardware and now The Woodland's Children's Museum. The other store I'm not sure on, as I've heard it was in the Wharf/Grogan's Mill shopping center area opened in 1978 with the Panther Creek store opening in 1983. The Grogan's Mill store probably didn't last long under the Randalls name before it was consolidated with their nearby store at Sawdust and Budde, which opened prior to the purchase. Ironically, they moved back close to that old location later when an Albertsons that had displaced part of the Grogan's Mill shopping center closed and Randalls bought that store. Do I have this all right?

I believe that was correct, part of Fame City. There's a commercial actually that shows a part of it. It looks like it had a driving range or something because the actual "park" area was at the direct corner of Main and Braeswood, which Residence Inn DIDN'T build on. That remained vacant for twenty more years until 7000 Main (Southside Group, specialty pharmacy company) was built.

I was relying on the scan of "Houston Today", a 1970s volume of the "modern" developments in the suburbs and the downtown at the time (while it's great that there's a complete scan, some of the maps like Brookhollow are sort of illegible). It was listed as Humble Oil & Refining probably because they were the ones that started it, though by the time it was built, the Humble name had been discarded in favor of Exxon.

The demolition going on here looks like the Exxon Brookhollow site (NE corner of Northwest Freeway and Dacoma) that was vacated for their Woodlands campus a few years back (Google Maps shows an "ExxonMobil Customer Services" at this building), with this being the last building. Just based on the way that the buildings were constructed, it looks like they were all constructed as a larger campus (including a lovely courtyard with lots of trees which sadly didn't survive). My resources say that they were constructed for Humble Oil in the early 1970s.

I assume Burger King gets demo'd for the direct connector ramps? Well. I need to see the Gulf/Ace Hardware too soon as that seems to be on the hit list as well. Where are the site plans for this?