Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a guest submission from HHR’s good friend Anonymous in Houston Every so often, someone in the retail enthusiast community will stumble upon great sources of retail history in unlikely or hidden corners of the Internet. Loyal Houston Historic Retail readers will know that in just the last few months, we’ve managed to find a large repository of retail news videos clips at The Portal to Texas History website and we …
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This Week in Demolition: Retroactive Permits? No Timewise better than the present for Zuma Fun Center!
Howdy Folks, and welcome back to another edition of This Week in Demolition! If you showed up last week wondering where the demo post was, I do apologize, but such are the perils of what is mostly a one-man operation. You can always check Houston Historic Retail’s Facebook page for more information on missing posts. Interesting demolitions this week include the shell station at Chimney Rock, and 59. Originally a Mobil Owned and Operated Station, …
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Lake Oil Co, a lesson in identifying old gas stations in Texas!
Old gas stations are not an expertise of mine. I like to look at them well enough! Especially, when they’re still operating as a modern gas station, but I don’t know too much about them. When you look at most of the companies and stores represented on this website, I chronicle their existence in the conscious mindset (so from the 60s forward really). This is mostly because retailing has expanded quite a bit over the …
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Permit Roundup: New chains, meet old locations
Howdy, folks, and welcome back to another edition of Permit Roundup! Today we’re taking a look at a few retail developments throughout the Houston area. Let’s start off with some newcomers to town. It seems that the Post Oak California Pizza Kitchen, who closed their Texas outlets during a COVID induced bankruptcy, may be host to a new restaurant. Il Braco, a noteworthy Dallas Italian restaurant, has filed remodel permits at 1705 Post Oak Boulevard …
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It’s been how many years since Circle K bought our Corner Store?!
In 1977 the Valero Energy Corporation was formed by the State of Texas, as a successor to a failed natural gas transmission company that Coastal had set up years prior. In connection with the Texas Railroad Authority (nothing to do with railroads), Coastal was allowed to build a multi thousand-mile set of pipelines, that supplied natural gas to city utilities. Most large Texas cities were tied into the Coastal system, with the unobtainable promise that …
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Stripes begin to fade as the 7-Eleven conversions push on
Howdy folks, let’s get started today by a simple recap of how 7-Eleven entered Houston (the second time). After exiting in the 1980s & 1990s, Houston was notably absent of most chain gas stations, including 7-Eleven and Circle K. Throughout the next 25 years this would be the norm, until 7-Eleven began exploring our town around 2012, with their purchase of Tetco and Speedy Stop locations, around the metropolitan area but not within city limits. …
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Permit Roundup: Visitors abound: Mr. Potato drops in from New Orleans, and Happy Lemon from China!
Newcomers enter into Houston Howdy, folks, and welcome back to our regularly scheduled Permit Roundup! This week seems to have been relatively quiet as far as new filings go. However, we do have a few standouts, so let’s start with those. Two “out of town” restaurants have filed permits to build locations in Houston. One of these is Mr. Potato. The restaurant concept was born over in New Orleans originally as a food truck, opening …
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A journey through Buc-ee’s turbulent youth
A quick aside before we begin today’s post. There was an excellent online review I read a while back that somewhat inspired me to write this post. It taxonomized Buc-ee’s locations by size, giving two examples “Baby Beaver” to describe the original stores in Lake Jackson, and Adolescent stores to describe ones like the store off 290 on Muschkee Road. For this post, I propose adding a few more classifications to the taxonomy. A “Papa …
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Permit Roundup: New Retail Spaces Appear Throughout Town, Multiple Remodels, and New Restaurants
Welcome back to our second Permit Roundup, this week our post is a bit shorter than last week. It seems similarly to Demolitions Reports, the Residential/Commercial balance changes from week to week, again with an emphasis on the residential permits. Also, if you didn’t read it in yesterday’s demolition post, my server is running very slowly at the moment, but I am in the process of updating, so please bear with me in the meantime. …
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7-Eleven has finally hit the end of the Raceway!
If you’re a regular follower at all of Houston Historic Retail then at some point you’ve seen our coverage of 7-Eleven’s return to Houston which at some point has been a bit contentious. It all started with a post back in February of 2020 when there was scant evidence of 7-Eleven’s return, which had been in progress since 2014! However, by early 2021 7-Eleven had made great strides in not only converting existing locations but …
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