Safeway #1111
Address: 1010 Texas Avenue S. (originally 1010 College Avenue)
Bryan, TX
Opened (as Weingarten): 1954
Opened (as Safeway): 1984
Became AppleTree: 1989
What's There Now: Rockies, C&J Barbecue, Bingo Barn
This post was originally based on "Weingarten Supermarket, Bryan" from Brazos Buildings & Businesses
Weingarten was an old-line Houston supermarket chain (it became a real estate manager later), colloquially Weingarten's (which was on the sign). While a lot of Weingarten stores became Safeway stores in Houston (and later AppleTree), not all of them did--the companion College Station store which lasted no more than around 2 months, Weingarten's here lasted for about three decades before it changed hands and closed less than a decade later. Either way, Safeway's time with Weingarten, from picking up many stores in 1984 to spinning off the chain in the late 1980s with the AppleTree division wasn't a long time, but it was important.
Opening on September 1, 1954, the 25,000 square foot supermarket was not only the largest in Bryan, but featured a variety of things unusual at the time, though may seem commonplace today. These included a self-service deli, a general merchandise department "where the housewife can find everything from work clothes to dresses to cooking equipment", a drug and tobacco department, "magic carpet" automatic doors, a lunch counter, a children's daycare area "where they'll find comic books and other things to keep their attention", and a full-service butcher department. Courtesy of John Ellisor, check out the article from which these great facts were derived from.
While I can't imagine much general merchandise fitting in an area that seems pretty small itself for a grocery store, nevertheless, Weingarten stayed in this spot for nearly the next three decades before Weingarten's owners at the time, Grand Union, decided to divest the division.
The Weingarten was unceremoniously sold to Safeway in January 1984 but I don't know if Safeway rebranded the store or closed it and reopened it under its own name. Confusingly, the store remained open as the Safeway store at William Joel Bryan and North Texas Avenue did so (just a mile north) until that store moved in 1986 to Culpepper North (which would later be the last AppleTree store, ever). The sale of many Weingarten stores to Safeway was ultimately the undoing of the Houston division and later the AppleTree chain, as the Weingarten stores added to the Safeway Houston Division store count but were horribly dated by the mid-1980s and there wasn't ultimately any money to renovate the stores.
When AppleTree filed for bankruptcy in January 1992, the store at 1010 South Texas Avenue (originally 1010 South College Avenue, which was the road that ran on the store's west side), this one was one of the first go after just a mere three years, especially considering that the original Weingarten had been going for 30 years under that name. By the time AppleTree completely spun off as a fully independent chain with just half a dozen stores, this store had been referred to as one of the "dogs" as described by Richard Goeggel, VP of AppleTree at the time.
Later becoming Williams Furniture Company (see comments on the original BB&B page), part of the store is used to host 1016 S. Texas Avenue, a space used as a nightclub. Some basic Google searching shows that there was "Prime Time Nightclub" and "Whiskey River" recently, the latter predating the former, but not by much, but now it's Rockies (full name: "Rockies The Canyon") moved from its long-time spot at Post Oak Mall. 1018 S. Texas Avenue has been Bingo Barn for years, and at 1010 S. Texas Avenue, C&J Barbecue hangs off of the end, which I didn't get too good of a picture of. Note that despite the visible "old" C&J logo above, it's not the original location.
The pictures are bad because the sun was setting and I was taking it out of the car window (the neighborhood seemed a bit sketchy, although it was still daytime, I might've gotten out). I want to make another return trip to it, see if I can find more things about it. Mysteries abound still: as shown by the gallery linked above, there's a chimney in the back (and not on the C&J BBQ side either) and a lack of modern loading docks. I wondered if it had a railroad spur at one time, and that may be actually the case (a spur definitely ran through the area where Advance Auto Parts is, just south of the store). After all, trucks weren't as commonplace in 1954 as today, and shipping things from Brownsville sounds awfully harrowing for trucks in 1950s-era highways. But I don't know of any grocery stores in the 1950s that actually had railroad spurs. If anyone knows more about this store, such as that.
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