I was driving through Stafford the other day for an upcoming post, and happened upon a building I didn’t recognize. Generally when I drive around I have a nice mental GPS going, if you will. I can envision what buildings, landmarks, etc.. are coming up and surrounding me. Not an extraordinary feature by any stretch of the imagination but as you can assume retail enthusiasts’ mental GPS’s have far more information related to buildings and landmarks than most other folks around us. That’s why I felt very caught off guard when I saw the Ashcraft European Bakery building. For many years I was unable to figure out what this building previously had been. You see I had driven up and down 1092, and 90-A most of my life, but with the constant construction in the area, I just couldn’t recall what had been here. Obviously the building had been patched up at some point with a new facade, but I just couldn’t figure it out. I tried searching newspaper archives, using historical imagery, and reaching out to friends on the inside to no avail. This building sat unsolved for some time, that is, until one day Google Maps updated their Streetview imagery adding back some older shots that been deleted when the underpass was built at this corner. The 2008 photos clearly identified this as a…… well I’ll leave that for you to click on if you want to know. For everyone else, lets continue and start looking through the photos I took.
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Ha, yeah, the expectant mother and curved interior walls are probably the biggest giveaway, but those would not be obvious unless someone walks around this property. It would be hard to tell that this was a Greenhouse Kroger from some distance. It’s kind of funny how some retail conversions of Greenhouse ex-Krogers have done less work to conceal the former life of the property than this non-retail conversion!
There are a lot of former Krogers lurking around Houston. There are a couple of obvious ones that I didn’t even know about until recently. One is this one at Tidwell & the Eastex Freeway. I have not confirmed that it’s an old Kroger, but what else could it be? Link: https://goo.gl/maps/yHPRL8a45BbmVrqq6
Another ex-Kroger that I didn’t know about is this well-preserved Kroger Superstore exterior at this Family Thrift Center store on Polk. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but maybe not everyone knows about it. It’s pretty awesome. Link: https://goo.gl/maps/N6VJiovUzpuqCgsPA
I made the mistake of clicking on the Street View link before looking at your pictures and trying to solve the mystery myself. Now I’ll never know if I’d have gotten it right! 😂 Definitely some recognizable elements here, though…