Crain's Garden Center

4511 Highway 6 North

Today, this is a Discount Tire, with Discount Tire's store being built in 1989. Based on aerials, the original garden center dates back to the 1970s. From The Houston Post, June 12, 1985.

Quality Inn (Southwest Freeway)

4020 Southwest Freeway

This hotel was built in 1969 as Executive Motor Inn, with name changes as follows as per newspaper references: Executive Red Carpet Inn (1972) though references to the Executive Motor Inn or Executive Motor Hotel existed into 1980, Executive Motor Hotel (1981), Quality Inn - Greenway Plaza (1983), Ramada Inn - Greenway Plaza (1992), Executive Inn - Greenway Plaza (early 1993), Super 8 Inn (late 1993), Executive Inn - Greenway Plaza (1997), Hawthorn Inn & Suites (mid-2000), and Comfort Inn & Suites (fall 2003).

Sometime around late 2006 the hotel was closed and demolished as per Google Earth and HCAD records. The ad is from a tourist guide from the mid-1980s.

Former Joe's Crab Shack on Northwest Freeway

Picture by author from September 2018, when it was BrickHouse Tavern + Tap.
The restaurant at 12910 Northwest Freeway first opened in 1997 as Joe's Crab Shack, which was a growing chain under parent company Landry's (you can see it in Google Street View as Joe's). After Landry's sold Joe's Crab Shack to investors in 2006, in 2008, the restaurant was closed with other underperforming locations to be converted to a new restaurant concept, BrickHouse Tavern + Tap, with this location being first to open in January 2009. By the picture above was taken, Joe's Crab Shack was back in the possession of Landry's having purchased JCS Holdings (renamed as Ignite Restaurant Group in 2009) in 2017 after Ignite's bankruptcy. Despite surviving the bankruptcy of Ignite and the re-acquisition by Landry's, this particular location was shuttered in March 2022. In early 2023, it reopened as a Cajun-California cuisine restaurant concept called "Cali Kitchen & Bar", though this has since closed around early 2026 (that's when their social media accounts stopped posting); I think I noticed it when their parking lot was empty and all the other restaurants nearby were full (except for the defunct Fuddruckers, of course).

UPDATE 06-26-2026: The most recent update rewrote a good part of the post and renamed it from "Brick House Tavern + Tap (290)". This is part of the changes to help integrate it with Northwest Freeway.

Former Albertsons #2766

In the years since this picture was taken, the logo has been updated with the Albertsons-era "Food" and "Pharmacy" signs removed.
One of the more popular posts¹ on Albertsons Florida Blog (a site I still follow regularly) is their look at Albertsons #4466, located in St. Port Lucie, Florida, which closed in 2012 despite a recently renewed lease and supposed profitability (it's possible that it did well right before the recession, where the PSL area was hit heavily with foreclosures). Well, PSL did have a twin store (more like a multiple birth), #2766, located at 9125 West Sam Houston Parkway North. Unlike #4466, which was mauled for a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market, #2766 closed a decade prior but remained remarkably intact under Kroger.

Despite being updated with the same Kroger décor ("Bountiful") that had swept the chain by that time, Kroger #739 as it is numbered now², still held remarkably true to the 4466 layout. It had the same ceiling style and bore enough of a resemblance that I was able to look at the map with my phone and more or less follow it through. I could probably look at the pictures in AFB and visualize the "Grocery Palace" (Albertsons' official name for the package—this is sometimes called "Theme Park", a term Acme Style coined). The Starbucks was in the same place, the deli and meats were in the same place, and while the center store probably saw a rearrangement at some point, there were a few notable changes in the front. The old camera center had been converted to offices with the pet supply area converted to HBA, with the pharmacy next to it (it also added a walk-up pharmacy), and a bank space as well (this may have been part of the original layout), as well as a few other changes. The area around the florist was downsized (didn't see evidence of the former laundromat, though I wasn't looking too hard), as the customer service desk was moved either next to the restrooms or in front of the "Albertsons Reading Center" area. This store opened in 1999 (September 1999, if my notes are right), spending about two and a half years as an Albertsons before being sold to Kroger.

Very Albertsons-like in center store.
This part of town is very Kroger-concentrated due to them purchasing a number of Albertsons locations in town. Just two miles west on West Road is another Kroger (a Kroger Signature built around the turn of the millennium), and at that point, it's where you can find four Kroger stores within a three mile radius, two of which were former Albertsons (the other, of course, is 2790) and two of which were older stores on Northwest Freeway, one of which was a former Safeway/AppleTree. There was a period of about three years when all of these stores operated.

I didn't get a lot of pictures of the store, unfortunately, but the former Albertsons Express is still in business as Kroger's "Kwik Shop", which is run by their convenience store division (a full Kroger-run and Kroger-branded convenience store was opened in College Station in 2016, and that made industry headlines) before they sold off the division, at which point it was run by the supermarket chain thesmselves.

Not a good picture. This was later rebranded as a Kroger convenience store after the division was sold off, but the "Snacks" and "Beverages" signage still stands.
This was the current Street View when this post was originally posted in 2018, with the pictures here taken in summer 2016 by author. It also was an updated version of a 2016 post of Safeway and Albertsons in Texas Blog.

1. In 2016, anyway. I don't have access to recent metrics.
2. In the Houston/Southwest Division of Kroger, #7xx stores were acquired from Albertsons.

UPDATE 07-29-2026: Updated for integration to Carbon-izer with new name (formerly titled as "Kroger #739"). The original post is now almost a decade old.