Monday, September 24, 2007

The Marina Safeway at Night, 1968


A beautiful dusk view of what is undoubtedly the most famous individual grocery store location in the country, if not the world. This is, of course, the Marina Safeway – San Francisco Landmark, Meeting Place Extraordinaire (having duly earned the nickname “Dateway”), and the Proud Standard of Safeway Stores, Incorporated. This store, still going strong, is located at 15 Marina Boulevard, San Francisco and was opened in 1959. It set the style that even today is the one most closely associated with Safeway, and it had a not inconsiderable influence on the store design of other supermarket chains.

Interestingly, Safeway was forced to wage a “protracted zoning fight” in order to win approval to build this store, according to the July, 1960 issue of Chain Store Age magazine. After gaining approval, some area residents still objected, so Safeway set out to build “a showplace that would pacify its opponents and satisfy the neighborhood’s esthetic as well as practical needs”. They certainly succeeded.

The store originally opened with a different interior design scheme than the one pictured here. If you click on the photo, you can see that by this time, Safeway had replaced it with their standard 60’s look.

6 comments:

  1. It just looks so gorgeous all lit up!

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  2. looks pretty much the same today - a true classic store in probably S.F's primo real estate location!

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  3. Those Safeway Marinas are a thing of beauty to my jaded old eyes. Lots of memories come flooding back when I see that distinctive curve.

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  4. Captain - I'm with you on that - it's a beautiful, timeless design. Every year more of these fall to remodeling, making them an increasingly rare sight.

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  5. I've been to that store. The mosaic murals are really cool.

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