A Surprise Visit to Katz City

So I’m on a business trip to Springfield, Missouri a few weeks ago, in town just for the day. I’m there to call on a customer, a well-known manufacturer of well-known products, as part of an effort to become well-known. As I drive through town, the usual mental prep is taking place.

Until I spy a building in the distance, that is, one I’d previously seen only in photographs. It’s a CVS Pharmacy to beat them all – a gigantic glass-fronted structure with a zig-zag (the proper architectural term is “folded plate”) canopy suspended above the store facade. I recognize it instantly as the famous “Katz City” drug/department store, opened in 1961 as the crown jewel of the legendary Katz Drug Co., a Kansas City-based drugstore chain known for their unique-looking stores, brash marketing approach and above all, their mascot - a grinning black cat. To top it off, just a block or two up Glenstone Avenue is a perfectly preserved early 60’s Steak ‘n Shake restaurant, a delightful relic of that long-ago era when fast food was good for us. (Or at least we didn’t know any better. That itself was good for us.)

Out the window goes my mental prep, of course. Wild thoughts begin to run through my head, like how to break the news to the family when I get home that night – “I’ve been transferred to Springfield. We’re moving in two weeks. Sorry, Kids!” After a few minutes I settle down, deciding instead to just visit the store after my appointment is over. When I get there later that afternoon, I’m struck by a couple of things –the zig-zag canopy’s fine state of repair (by no means typical for classic retail properties, unfortunately), and by the sheer size of the place - the typical CVS interior decor and signage was there, of course, but so was what seemed like miles of low-rise shelving devoted to gift items that you’d never find in one of their typical stores, plus a massive-width main aisle. An impressive 75,000 square feet, I learn upon checking my “Katz files” back home.

Indeed it was the largest store in the Katz chain at the time of opening, described by the company as “The Store of the Future Today” and “a one-stop shopping colossus”. The store was designed by the Kansas City-based architectural firm of Kivett and Myers, whose resume of deco and mid-century modern gems includes several other Katz stores that still stand, such as these striking examples in Kansas City on Main Street and in Overland Park, Kansas. The Springfield store was unique in that (to my knowledge) it was the only Katz location not to feature their trademark script logo or the black cat mascot on the store exterior, although both were likely seen in abundance inside.

As the chain’s ownership has changed through the years, so has the name above the front doors, of course. In 1971, Katz sold out to Skaggs Drug Centers, Inc., whereupon the store became a Skaggs unit. In 1984, Skaggs (now renamed American Stores, after another company they bought) acquired Chicago-based Jewel Companies, owners of the Osco Drug chain, and eventually the Skaggs stores were redubbed as Osco units. In 1998, American Stores was sold to Albertsons, and when that chain was dismantled in 2006, the free-standing Osco Drug stores, including the futuristic one-stop shopping colossus pictured above, were snapped up by CVS. Thankfully, they’ve preserved the store’s classic exterior thus far.

The photo above shows the store as it appeared not long after its December 1961 grand opening, festooned and glowing for the occasion. I’d love to have “crossed this Katz’ path” back then, but better late than never!

A Trip to the Jewel Grand Bazaar

It happened only once, so despite the passage of time it stands out in my memory. It was the night our family broke from the routine. The night we ventured out and tried something new. The night we threw our grocery-shopping inhibitions to the wind. It was The Night of the Jewel Roadtrip.

Sure, we had a Jewel Food Store right in the center of town. It was a late-fifties remodel, complete with the famous Jewel porcelain storefront and a quaint tin-tiled ceiling. We didn’t shop there often, however, because in the next town, some seven minutes away if you took your time, was a much larger, more modern Jewel-Osco food and drug combination store. With its far greater selection, most of our family’s food dollars (save for the occasional trip to Dominick’s) were spent there.

One fall evening, in 1977 to the best of my recollection, the folks told my brothers and I to load up into the car (a powder-blue Ford Torino station wagon – yes, we bought the dream), we were going grocery shopping at a new store near downtown Chicago (?!). To cut short the collective groan, they offered an explanation – this was a special store, different from what we were used to, with unique stuff and more of it. It was a “Super Jewel” or something like that. Suddenly, the prospect of getting out of studying on that school night finally registered – “Sounds really cool, Mom!”

So as night fell we drove, into the city, to the corner of 54th and Pulaski, whereupon we pulled into the fairly full parking lot of a large retail store. The familiar orange Jewel signage sported an unfamiliar name- “Jewel Grand Bazaar”. Wow! And different it was – sort of a combination of quasi-European Market Village (little mini-shops, faux Euro-decor with orange stripes everywhere) and sprawling warehouse (huge quantities of product in open-front wire cages). “Bazaar”, indeed!

Probably the most memorable aspect of that shopping experience (beside the store’s prime selection of Mad Magazine paperbacks, which was worth the long roundtrip in itself) was our first exposure to Jewel’s huge new “generic” product line, which at that time hadn’t been rolled out to the company’s entire store lineup yet. The generics were Jewel’s response to the economic travails of the late 70’s, when inflation seemed to reduce Americans’ purchasing power by the week. It was a “no-frills”, rock-bottom price product line, and it seemed to cover nearly every packaged food category imaginable. The traditional Jewel store brand names – Mary Dunbar, Bluebrook and Cherry Valley (long-standing house brands that were about to be phased out, replaced with a unified “Jewel” brand) , with their bright, colorful labels were tossed aside in favor of an austere look – plain white labels on uncoated paper stock and military style stenciled-look lettering. The only “decorative” element was a bi-colored stripe – black and olive drab. Now every suburban housewife could realize her dream – a pantry full of C-rations! Our family stocked up big time.

On September 27, 1973, the first Jewel Grand Bazaar store opened at 5320 South Pulaski Road in Chicago. At 90,000 square feet, the new store was nearly double the size of the typical Jewel-Osco store. The Grand Bazaar concept, more than two years in the making, “present(ed) new merchandising techniques to shoppers”, with “…wide use of palletized basket presentations in the customer shopping area”, as described in a Chicago Tribune article. As such, Jewel was one of the first major supermarket retailers to introduce the concept of buying in bulk. As mentioned, among the Bazaar’s most notable features were its “shops within the store”, including the Chef’s Kitchen (a name already in use by Jewel) prepared foods section, a bake shop, the “Pier 14” fresh seafood area, and the “Cheese Chalet” (later called the “Country Cheese Shop”), where quarter-ton blocks of Wisconsin Cheddar were routinely wheeled in, to be parceled off in small wedges for delighted customers.

The Grand Bazaars were loosely based on the Hypermarché (Hypermarket) concept, which gained significant popularity in Europe starting in the 1970’s. A typical European Hypermarket was a very big store, 200,000 square feet or more, offering a large selection of general merchandise and a full supermarket lineup, with many heavier-volume items sold in bulk. Influenced by this, Jewel had indeed begun development of a Hypermarket idea of its own at the time, although it never came to fruition. At 90,000 square feet and carrying a more limited selection of general merchandise, the Jewel-Osco Grand Bazaars at least qualified, according to Chicago Tribune business columnist George Lazarus, for the title “hypergrocery”. When you consider that many of the Grand Bazaars were coupled with a (Jewel-owned) Turn-Style discount store, they were at least close to the mark.

One pioneering aspect of the Grand Bazaars was the use of electronic checkstands, utilizing “20 electronic itemizing stations” with “four separate stations for payment”. Electronic cash registers were very much a new thing for Jewel (and anyone else fortunate enough to have them yet) in 1973, and it would be a couple more years before the UPC (Universal Product Code) system was fully in place. There were also “cart-to-car” pickup systems in the Bazaar stores, which was in one sense a holdover from a more service-oriented era. And in response to the growing “consumerist” movement of the day, each Bazaar featured a “Consumer Corner” staffed with its own full-time home economist, ready and willing to provide a sympathetic ear and sound advice. (“Well you know, I’ve had issues with shish kabob since high school…”)

Within six months of opening, the Pulaski Road Grand Bazaar was drawing 30,000 customers weekly and was projected to hit $20 million a year in sales according to Donald Perkins, Jewel’s highly-respected chairman, as quoted in the Chicago Tribune. The store’s Osco Drug unit, Perkins said, was the highest grossing in the Chicago area. The press weighed in favorably as well - Trib columnist George Lazarus pronounced the Grand Bazaars “an enormous success”, and mentioned that “according to sources”, Jewel had plans in place to have 12 to 15 Grand Bazaars operating at some point. Lazarus relayed an exciting finding of Jewel management – “The beautiful part of the Grand Bazaar story is that these stores aren’t taking much, if any, business away from other Jewel and Osco stores.”

Two additional Grand Bazaars opened in the summer of 1974, on 87th Street at the Dan Ryan Expressway and at the intersection of Grand and Kostner Avenues. Within the next few years, other Grand Bazaars would follow – 115th and Halsted, Rockford, Franklin Park and even in Milwaukee, a new Jewel market at the time, where the company wisely featured local favorite Meurer Bakery in place of their standard Bake Shop.

One of the grandest Grand Bazaar openings ended up being one of the last. In February 1977, the seventh Jewel Grand Bazaar opened up as part of the first phase of The Brickyard, a rare in-city mall project that received much laudatory press for that very fact. The rise, fall and hoped-for comeback of The Brickyard is well-documented on this recent Labelscar post.

By the end of the 1970’s, the Grand Bazaar concept seemed to just fade away. After 1978, Jewel’s annual reports are silent on the subject. One can assume that they took away certain lessons from the venture and just moved on – larger food/drug combination stores were the way to go, bulk bins of product, not so much. Several of the stores continued to operate for years with Grand Bazaar signage still in place, including the Franklin Park store where I shopped a number of times in the mid-80’s, but for all intents and purposes they were standard Jewel-Osco stores by then – no bulk bins, no cheese block, no home economist. The Rockford store was converted to a “Magna” no-frills warehouse store. Today, some of the stores live on as Jewel-Oscos, the Franklin Park unit being a nicely renovated example.

When I left the Chicago area in 1987, the “Generics” line was still available, although it had greatly diminished in popularity in those more prosperous times. At some point it was phased out, although a number of deep-discount grocery stores continue to stock plain-jane staple goods today. Though the economy of the last few years could arguably be compared to that of the late 70’s, generic products have not made a comeback in this age of brand power. The major chains have wisely taken the cue, ramping up their store brands’ quality and label-appeal, and everything I’ve read says that strategy is paying off handsomely. Now if they could only bring back those home economists…

The photos above are all 1970’s Jewel publicity shots, and the stylized Grand Bazaar font and “J” logo can be seen in several of them. The first photo, from 1974, shows the brand new Grand Bazaar at 87th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Photos 2 through 10 are all from the Brickyard Mall location, 1977. The camera and cosmetics department views show the typical interior design scheme of late 70’s/early 80’s Osco Drug stores. The black and white photo, from 1974, shows the Milwaukee location, with the Meurer Bakery featured prominently. Next is a 1975 aerial view of the Grand and Kostner store, with good neighbor Turn-Style to the right. The last two photos, from 1973, feature the very first Jewel Grand Bazaar at 54th and Pulaski, where some smart shoppers have selected giant boxes of Tide, "the washday miracle", a photogenic consumer product if there ever was one. This is the store that my family and I visited on that fateful evening described above.

Below, from 1977, is a close-up view of some of the Jewel Generics product line. You’ll notice that the ladies in the background have adopted “generic” facial expressions, in keeping with the spirit of things.

Last Spin of the Turn-Style

The mid/late-1970’s proved to be the Waterloo of a number of discount retail chains with a significant presence in Chicago. The late George Lazarus, longtime business writer for the Chicago Tribune, listed the recent casualties in a 1978 editorial – Topps (Interstate Stores), Korvettes, W.T. Grant and Robert Hall Village. In short order, Jewel-owned Turn-Style would be added to the list.

Turn-Style’s profitable run at the end of the sixties and the dawn of the seventies brought about an acceleration, however mild, of the Family Center program, where the chain grew from a couple of area stores to thirteen by 1976. The last Chicago Turn-Style stores were opened in conjunction with a new Jewel concept – the Jewel Grand Bazaar, a larger (60,000-plus square feet) supermarket format that enjoyed great success in its early years. Loosely based on the European “hypermarkets”, these stores combined the feel of an open air market with huge bulk displays of product. Jewel, widely credited with marketing the country’s first “generic” supermarket product line (in 1977), used the Grand Bazaar stores for its launch. Three Grand Bazaar locations that adjoined some of the final Turn-Style stores were located at 54th Street and Pulaski Road, 87th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway, and at Grand and Kostner Avenues. In 1974, Turn-Style’s president, Bill Lewis, was reassigned by Jewel to head up a new group, charged with developing a "real" hypermarket for Jewel. It was to include a discount department store, pharmacy and food store under one (very large -200,000 sq. ft.) roof, in what could have been a more upscale precursor to today’s Wal-Mart Supercenters. Sadly, this never materialized.

Turn-Style, which as Lazarus put it, “(had) never been a winner for Jewel” at least held its own into the mid-70’s, but things went downhill quickly from there. In 1975, Turn-Style lost its independent division status and was placed under the Osco group, along with the very successful Osco Drug stores and Jewel’s hapless, soon to be jettisoned Republic Lumber stores.

In 1978, there were 24 Zayre stores and 38 Kmart (who had just snapped up two Korvettes and two Robert Hall Village locations) stores in operation in the greater Chicago area, huge footprints (and a correspondingly huge advertising advantage) in contrast with Turn-Style, which was standing still after all those years with only 13 area units, incomplete market coverage and far less than ideal advertising utilization.

When May Department Stores, Inc., with its growing Venture stores division came calling, Jewel was receptive. On March 7, 1978 it was announced that Jewel would sell 22 Turn-Styles to May for conversion into Venture stores, including locations in Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska. Ten of the 13 Chicago stores were included, with the other three – Harlem-Foster, Niles and Westmont retained by Jewel for eventual conversion to larger Jewel-Osco units. The handful of Boston units went to various tenants, including Zayre.

The top photo, from 1975, shows the 87th and Dan Ryan Expressway Turn-Style/Osco Drug/Jewel Grand Bazaar location. The second photo shows the Quincy, Massachusetts location, originally opened in 1966 and remodeled ten years later, in a photo taken shortly thereafter. The photo gives a nice look at Jewel’s New England family – Star Market, Brigham’s Ice Cream Shop, Osco Drug and Turn-Style. The only name missing, for obvious reasons, is a White Hen Pantry convenience store. The last photo shows one of the last Turn-Styles, the location of which I’m not sure of.

Osco Drug - Out of the Past

This late 40’s scene from downtown Rockford, Illinois looks like it could have come straight out of a film noir classic. The photo is part of an intriguing series of night shots taken by Rockford native Bob Anderson, who now resides in Beijing, China.

The store pictured is very typical of Osco Drug stores opened during the first twenty-odd years of the company’s existence. Founded as Pay-Less Drug in Rochester, Minnesota in 1937 by Lorenzo L. Skaggs, scion of one of the Safeway Stores founding families, the company was dubbed Owners Service Company (later shortened to “Osco”) following mergers with a few other small drug chains.

By 1960, Osco had 30 drugstores operating in six Midwestern states – Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota and Iowa. Their success (and favorable geographic locations) had caught the attention of Chicago-based Jewel Tea Company, which was about to embark on a series of diversification moves.

On February 16, 1961 through an exchange of stock, Osco became a wholly owned subsidiary of Jewel Tea. The most obvious advantage that Jewel gained from the merger was the fact that they now had both pharmacy experience and a well-known regional drugstore nameplate in-house, which enabled Jewel to implement its long planned “combination store” strategy, the key to Jewel’s success in the both the sixties and the decades that followed. Jewel was one of the early adopters of the “combination store” format, essentially a supermarket and drugstore under one roof, with or without shared checkstands. Jewel-Osco would prove to be a powerful brand combination, enduring to this day.

Jewel would initially split Osco into two separate operating groups – the first known as the “Main Street” Osco stores, those stores located near the outside limits of the Chicago area (in the downtown areas of such cities as Elgin, Joliet, Waukegan and Rockford, for example), along with downstate cities such as Bloomington. The Main Street group also included all Osco stores outside of Illinois. The second group was known as the “Chicago Osco Drug” group, which of course was made up of the Chicago metropolitan area stores, including those combined with Jewel Food Stores.

Pictured below in a scene of very different character from the first one (but still pretty cool looking) is Rockford’s “new” Osco store in an early 1960’s postcard view. The store had moved some years earlier to a new location directly across the street from the original Osco, the edge of which can be seen to the far right of the photo. Also of interest is the Carson Pirie Scott store, which had replaced the original Block & Kuhl store in that location.

Gotta Stop at Jewel's

A great 1966 view of a new Jewel-Osco “Master Market” combination store, complete with rooftop parking to maximize customer draw in this Chicago city location, a place where free parking can’t always be taken for granted.

This store typifies the architectural style that Jewel (often affectionately referred to as “Jewel's” or The Jewel) used for decades – clean and simple, not flashy. But for those of us who grew up there – memorable.

Jewel Food Stores - Windy City Winter

This circa-1962 shot of a Jewel Store has "Chicago Winter" written all over it. By the following year, most new Jewel stores would feature an Osco Drug section (Osco Drug Co. was acquired by Jewel in 1961), but for a few years the company continued to build new stand-alone Jewels as well.

Welcome To The Past!

Our best memories often arise from life's simplest events - going with family or friends to the donut shop, to Denny's, to Baskin-Robbins and on and on. More often than not, the settings for these memories were in the most routine of places, including... the local grocery store.

My name is Dave, and I grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1960's and 1970's. Quite a few of the suburbs, in fact, as we moved seven times within the Chicago area between 1966 and 1977. The two "constants", indeed the only major supermarket chains that have survived were Jewel and Dominick's. They were everywhere. Throw in a few National Tea stores in the early years and a couple of A&P's later on, and there you have it -my growing-up grocery experience.

Well, not quite - I had one set of grandparents in Georgia, where I got to know Winn-Dixie, and the other set of grandparents in Rhode Island, where we hit the Stop and Shop now and then and the Star Market (Gram correctly pronounced it "Stah Mahket") and the Almacs (a now defunct Rhode Island supermarket chain) with alarming regularity.

Toss in over 20 years of nationwide traveling for my job, encountering a slew of Krogers, Publixes, Ralphs and many others, and I've drawn a couple of conclusions. One, the newer stores aren't as interesting as the older ones - the unique and sometimes outlandish store designs have given way to a standarized sameness -beige walls with teal and mauve signs in way too many cases. Secondly, I've learned that some folks remember and are interested in "the way they were".

So come along, and we will look at some retail classics in the coming weeks.

To start, here is one that's close to my heart - a Jewel/Osco "Master Market" from 1965. Jewel was one of the early pioneers of the food/drug combination stores, and although the location is unknown for this photo, this prototype existed in the location that my family frequented -on Route 83 (Elmhurst Road) In Des Plaines. The store still exists, but was expanded and remodeled extensively in the mid-70's. A similar store exists on Plum Grove Road in Palatine. This store was also expanded around the same time, but it retained the basic look of the store shown here.

A year and a half after this, my first post, I received an email from Keith, who identified the pictured store's location. It is probably one I should have remembered, since we shopped there occasionally when I was young. This store was and is located on the corner of Vail and Wing streets in Arlington Heights, a northwest suburb of Chicago, and opened in 1964. It features a modified version of the original "Master Market" design, due to the fact the Chicago and North Western (now Union Pacific/Metra) railroad tracks cut across what would normally be parking space for the store. Notice the sharp diagonal on the parking rows and the fact that the store's entrance is offset to the left instead of centered, as they normally were. Jewel/Osco attempted to close the store a few years back due to its small size, but public demand convinced them to keep it open, and it now sports a unique facade and a special name - "Jewel/Osco Vail Street Market". Also note the water tower in the distant background, which was located on the Arlington Park Racetrack property. In the 70's, the water tower sported the track's stylized horse and jockey logo, which I recall. I'm not sure the water tower still exists, though. Thanks to Keith for this information!