Aside from the recently renovated La Posada Hotel and the famous corner, Winslow doesn’t seem to be doing so well these days. It has a ton of potential, though, and I can see it becoming much more of a destination in the future than it is now.

During the 1970s a strip center was constructed on Dan Street in the western area of Cyburbia. In the 1990s, the owners did a minor rehab…..nothing special. The object of this thread is to indicate (with each post) the businesses that come and go.

Neighborhood demographics include generally middle income, mostly blue collar and/or service industry workers. Dan Street is well-traveled, especially during certain rush hour periods, because of the large hospital and medical building complex that is a mile to the east.

On the east side of Cyburbia Ridge Plaza is Big Al’s Used Cars, a reasonably active used vehicle business. On the west side is an older-style Arby’s. Across the street is an older tavern…..currently sporting the moniker "Snuffy’s". (It has changed names and owners many times.)

As of January 1, 2009, here was the store list, with original tenants in blue:

Gimli’s Games
King’s Meats (Locations throughout Metro Cyburbia)
Curves
Family Independent Pharmacy
The Beer Dock
Elbo Room Bar & Restaurant (Thin-crust pizza a specialty)
Christian Science Monitor Reading Room
Bank Roll (Money-lending service, check-advance, etc.)
Medi-Gown (Medical clothing specialists)
EMPTY
Subway Sandwich Shop

On May 1, 2009, Family Independent Pharmacy filled its’ last script…..a victim of the numerous mega-drug stores that line Dan Street as you move farther west.

Each responder can post a biz that is leaving and a new biz…..or one or the other. Good descriptions of the "reasoning" will be especially nice, especially for the non-planner types (me), that are just trying to understand all of this.

Have fun.

Bear

Pie Town is a fascinating place. It’s basically an obscure, isolated quasi-ghost town with an economy based on pie. The Pie-O-Neer was closed when I went through, but the Daily Pie Cafe was open and I had some pie there. It was pretty good.

There’s a LOT of Cyburbians, myself included, that weren’t born in Texas but somehow ended up here. Texas is, indeed, like a whole ‘nother country: it’s the United States, for sure, but it seems somehow different than the other 49 states in a hard-to-place way. Texas transplants and others: what are some of the things that induced culture shock in you when you moved here?

Even though I live in Austin, a very liberal, funky city, it’s still very Texas in some ways. Culture shock for me includes:

* Proliferation of state symbols (flag, state silhouette, stars, etc). In other states, where I lived, excepting New Mexico, one seldom saw the state flag flying. Here, there’s just as many Texas flags fluttering as American flags.

* Aggies. It’s like a cult.

* Frontage roads. Liked the idea at first, but in Austin, signals are timed so that drivers encounter a red at EVERY light along a frontage road. It takes much longer to get to many stores and shopping centers, since you often have to loop around on frontage roads to get to a location on the other side of the Interstate; instead of being clustered at intersections; there’s no clusters of development, but rather strings. It also leads to a rather unsustainable and ugly development pattern, where commercial and semi-industrial development will be strung along frontage roads even in rural areas far from civilization.

* Friendly people. Really, the people here are perhaps the most genuine, friendliest folks I’ve ever met. Well, most of them. Shocked me at first, because I was expecting more gruff rancher-types.