Shopping in Los Angeles - The 1950's

There’s a ritual I never fail to observe when traveling to Los Angeles on business. I’ve done it for years now. Once I land, usually at LAX, grab my rental car and hit the road, I call home to let everyone know I arrived safely (transcontinental flight, you know), and at some point in the conversation I exclaim “I love L.A.!” in my best, most frazzled Randy Newman voice. It’s the title line from his 1983 hit song, and sometimes I’ll throw it in more than once. It’s an old shtick, but my wife still humors me each time.

And I really do love it. Not because I’m driving a convertible (just an “intermediate” car, which is rental car company language for “yogurt cup on wheels”) or wearing a Hawaiian shirt (“business casual” isn’t that casual, I’m afraid) or accompanied by bikini-clad women (the call home would be awkward to say the least), but because of all of the great-looking old retail buildings there: Spanish-style, mid-century modern, bizarre and uncategorizable, you name it. Sure, scads of them have been torn down over the years, but there’s still a lot to see - simply because so many were built there in the first place.

Thankfully, much of this is well-documented in still photographs, but I can’t help but wonder what it all must have looked like from the windshield perspective in its heyday. The amazing film clip above, from 1954 (sincere thanks to Julie for bringing it to my attention) is the closest thing I’ve found to that. Only 1:50 long, it provides a great, if fleeting, full-color snapshot of the City of Angels at an exciting point in the early postwar era.

I don’t know the origin of this particular clip, but it was likely made for a commercial purpose of some type. It’s a nice example of a genre known today as “ephemeral films” – educational films for classroom use or promotional movies produced for tourism bureaus, trade associations or corporations. They were glowing salutes to The American Way - progress and prosperity, the natural result of virtue, ingenuity and hard work. These films provide a fascinating, if not complete, slice of life from those times. And they always seemed to feature bouncy, optimistic soundtracks with plucking strings and insanely peppy woodwinds. I’m tempted to think that music like this just played in the air in those days, and could be heard whenever you stepped outside. (Someone, please tell me this was true!)

The local icons are well represented here - starting out with the approach to downtown L.A., we see the famous City Hall in a perfect “Dragnet establishing shot”, followed by the Angels Flight inclined railway in the Bunker Hill area of town. Then on to some of the main drags, including South Broadway in downtown L.A., Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, where a crowd is lined up outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (only the side of the building is shown – the Kodak theatre now sits in that spot next door, square atop the intersection of Hollywood and Orchid) for a showing of “The Robe”, one of those films the late movie palace historian Ben Hall would have called “the latest version of the Bible according to Cinemascope”.

And then (you knew we’d get around to this, didn’t you?) comes the really fun stuff, as far as those who regularly visit this site are concerned. In addition to the “postcard scenes” described above, the film depicts some of the L.A. area’s most noteworthy retail properties of the day, which by default means some of the most noteworthy anywhere. A few notes:

First up is a great pan shot of the Broadway-Crenshaw Center, opened in late 1947 in southwest Los Angeles and sporting subtleties of color one wouldn’t imagine based on the many period black and white photos that exist of the place. Interestingly, the facades seen here facing the parking lot were virtually duplicated on the opposite side of the shopping center, which lined the sidewalk along Crenshaw Boulevard.

Two years earlier the intersection of Crenshaw and Santa Barbara Avenue (renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd in the 1980’s) was home to only trees, grass and assorted wildlife, but the nearby population was beginning to boom. When The May Company announced plans to build a large branch store there, the Broadway reciprocated with plans for a huge Crenshaw location of its own, with a strip of some 15 supporting stores in tow, right across the street. Among the other tenants were Woolworth’s, Lerner Shops, Owl Rexall Drugs, Silverwoods (a downtown L.A.-based men’s clothing store) and a detached Von’s supermarket.

The design of the center was the work of architect Albert B. Gardner, who also had a hand in designing the circa-1928 City Hall seen at the beginning of the clip. One of the very largest shopping centers in the country at the time it opened, Broadway-Crenshaw yielded some important lessons for future retail development. I’ve summarized a few of them from Richard Longstreth’s great book “City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950” which devotes several pages to the center: For one, the head-to-head competition that both May Co. and The Broadway were dreading turned out to be a net plus, an early example of the drawing power of multiple large department stores in close proximity. Secondly, there was no need for the “duplicate storefronts” along the street line. Most customers drove to the center and used the parking lot, so “sidewalk shoppers” accounted for a low percentage of sales. Future shopping centers like this, for the most part, were slid to the middle of the parking lot. Third, Broadway-Crenshaw really needed a second large anchor to balance the traffic flow to the other stores. (The May Co. store didn’t count in that regard, of course.) This helped lead to the opposite ends or “dumbbell” configuration for 2-anchor malls seen countless times in the ensuing years. It also became clear that anchor department stores of this type could handle, and really needed, far more than 15 supporting stores.

The shopping center is now known as Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, which encompasses both the former Broadway and May Company properties. The Broadway store building still exists as the best-looking Walmart that will ever be, while the May Co. store is now a Macy’s. The smaller stores were torn down and replaced years ago. The photo above (same pic, two different “zoom levels”) is from the 1951 book “Shopping Centers – Design and Operation” by Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro, a vital early text on the subject.The Von’s (apostrophe long since dropped) supermarket at Crenshaw Center was not designed by Mr. Gardner, but by another L.A.-based architectural heavyweight, Stiles Clements. Mr. Clements had already done a great deal of work for Ralphs, one of Von’s main competitors, with designs ranging from exquisite Spanish-styled markets to some of the most striking streamlined buildings ever seen in retail. In later years, Clements played a key role in refining Sears’ distinctive “West Coast look”.

Lauded in an August 24, 1950 Los Angeles Times article as being “Rated the World’s Largest Grocery”, the store was indeed huge for the times at over 58,000 square feet (roughly half of that selling space), and it featured a mural depicting scenes of California history along the entire back wall, painted by artist Bert Makos. This photo also comes from the Baker and Funaro book cited above. Note the windmill on the corner - the beloved trademark of Van de Kamp’s, operator of supermarket bakery departments all over SoCal as well as their own coffee/bakery shops. Then, a brief glimpse of an early fifties Safeway store from an unidentified location. (I first assumed it was the nearby 39th and Crenshaw location that opened in 1952, but an opening day photo in the Los Angeles Times proved otherwise.) This store is typical of those Safeway was opening in many locations at that time, before the yellow-pyloned exteriors of the mid-fifties and the Marina family of designs launched at decade’s end. With over 10,000 feet of selling space, these stores must have seemed immense compared to the small, white-painted masonry units the company favored (note the first photo here) just a few years earlier.

The similarly-designed store pictured above was located in Lancaster, California. This photo appears here by the kind courtesy of Jacques Gautreaux, and is part of his great collection of retail photos from northern L.A. County’s Antelope Valley, taken in 1966.

The legendary Westwood Village Ralphs market appears next, a subject already covered in some depth here. Many thanks to “vieilles_annonces” (check out her astounding collection of vintage slides and magazine articles here) for use of the photo above. It predates the film clip by more than a decade, but offers a wonderful color view of the approach into town on Westwood Boulevard. Among other iconic structures are the Ralphs store to the right, Westwood’s unique Sears store in the middle, and the A&P (only the spire is visible) to the left.

A relatively minor entry in the SoCal retail history books is long-gone independent supermarket chain McDaniel’s Markets, which featured a jaunty Scotsman as their mascot and a tartan pattern as a key design element in their ads and on stores. By mid-1957, McDaniel’s had six stores, located in North Hollywood, Beverly Hills, East L.A. (famous as the birthplace of Cheech Marin), Maywood and Baldwin Park, according to the Los Angeles Times. That year, McDaniel’s bought out the six-store Walker’s Market chain, and between those stores and additional units built over the years, the company eventually grew to almost 25 stores.

In the early 60’s McDaniel’s went bankrupt, selling their choicest locations to Food Giant Markets. I wonder if some creative sloganeering would helped, like “Visit the Plaid Pylon, where we pile on the deals!” or “More buying power under the Tartan Tower!” (Or maybe it would have hastened their demise, you say.) The photo above, an artist’s rendering of the Oxnard, California location, appears here courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.

After that comes the sleek, curved facade of the Owl Rexall Drug at the corner of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards (near the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills), which opened in the fall of 1947 and is shown here in a publicity photo taken shortly thereafter. The huge, ultramodern drugstore was only the (curved) tip of the iceberg in this case, as it was attached to the new world headquarters of United-Rexall Drug Inc., which relocated there from Boston. The move was the brainchild of company president Justin Dart, a dashing, enigmatic former Walgreen executive (and former Walgreen son-in-law) who came to United in 1941 and wasted no time casting the company in his own image. Indeed, the firm would eventually be known as Dart Industries, with interests that ranged far beyond drugstores.

Owl, Rexall’s major west coast banner, was closely controlled by the parent company, as was its eastern counterpart Liggett, and hundreds of Rexall drug stores were operated under these two names. While neither Owl nor Liggett were strictly confined to the coasts, most Rexall stores in between (in what hipsters like you and I call “flyover country”) were more likely to sport one of multitudes of franchisee names on the familiar orange-and-blue signs.

The four-day grand opening kicked off on September 15, 1947 and at the podium, along with Dart himself, was California Governor Earl Warren (this was six years before he was appointed Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and had better things to do, like reshaping American life), Wisconsin Governor Oscar Rennebohm (Because he owned 14 Rexall drugstores in Madison, that’s why!), the mayor and the sheriff of Los Angeles, executives from Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola and Lambert Pharmacal (later known as Warner-Lambert) and other dignitaries too numerous to name here.

And there were celebrities galore, owing to Rexall’s prominence as a national sponsor and advertiser in those years when radio was the undisputed media king and many people went to the movies every single week – Jimmy Durante emceed each of the four days, and there were appearances by Dorothy Lamour, Red Skelton, Mickey Rooney, Peter Lawford, Pat O’Brien, Alan Young of future “Mister Ed” TV fame, Lynn Bari - a beautiful 20th Century Fox contract actress who deserved greater fame, and legendary newspaper gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. (Gosh, you’d think they would’ve put some more thought into this. I mean, drugstores don’t open every day, you know.)

Today the location is home to a CVS Pharmacy, Marshalls and a number of other retail tenants. The corner facade is still curved, leading me to believe the building shell may be original, but I don’t know that for a fact.

Another drugstore icon immediately follows. We see the Thrifty Drug location at the corner of Rodeo Road and La Brea Avenue in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, just a mile and a half from Crenshaw Center. By this time Thrifty, a fixture of the L.A. retail scene for decades, was well underway with a program to open larger stores in shopping center settings versus the traditional smaller streetfront units, although the latter type still made up the bulk of Thrifty’s then 100-plus stores.

Thrifty’s largest store yet, it was part of a shopping center developed by the company that also boasted a new Alpha Beta supermarket as a key tenant. As with the Owl Rexall store above, the store was built in conjunction with a new home office for the company (Thrifty was the third largest drug chain in America at that time) on the property.

The Baldwin Hills Thrifty attained instant landmark status due to its massive sign tower, affectionately named the “Trilon”. At 65 feet tall with three 15 by 35 foot faces (Weighing in at 12 tons, according to the Los Angeles Times. Did somebody throw this thing on a scale?) and a unique, funky steel structure design that brings to (my) mind some of Alexander Calder’s “stabile” sculpture pieces, the Trilon certainly served its purpose as an attention-getter for Thrifty.

The shopping center’s “premiere” (I just thought of that. Nice, huh?) took place on November 13, 1952 with actress Anne Baxter performing the ceremonial duties, an experience I’m sure she ranked right up there with her recent Oscar nomination for “All About Eve”. (Well, kinda sure, that is…) The next evening, singer/actor Tony Martin performed live at the Thrifty store. Mr. Martin, still kicking at age 99 and performing as recently as 2010, is one of the last survivors among America’s great crooners. He was married to Cyd Charisse, the great star of such classic MGM musicals as Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings, (shown all the time on TCM – if you haven’t seen them, you should) for 60 years until her passing in 2008.

The sign, which survived the infamous 1963 Baldwin Hills dam break and flood, still stands while the accompanying building bears scant resemblance to the original. It now sports the name of Rite Aid, Thrifty’s successor. The picture above is a detail from the store’s grand opening ad.

Last is an interesting curiosity - the Big Owl Market, or as the sign reads, “The Market of Tomorrow”. This venture by Owl Drug (United-Rexall) was a very early, largely forgotten attempt at a supermarket-drugstore combination, a format that would catch on big in the following decade, and indeed remains the template for the industry today.

Tested out on a smaller basis in Ontario, California a few months previously, the Big Owl opened on November 1, 1951 at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Kittredge Street in North Hollywood, just a couple of blocks up from the giant new Sears store on Victory Boulevard. The opening-day celebrity here was Lorraine Cugat, singer and (soon to be ex-) wife of bandleader Xavier Cugat. The store really did foreshadow some key elements of the combination store/superstore idea, with “a See’s candy shop (Is it legal to leave the State of California without a box of See’s candy? I don’t want to find out.), Van de Kamp’s bakery, dry cleaning shop, a liquor, tobacco, pen and camera room (all you need, right?), a gift shop and a 12-chair barber shop with a jet fire engine chair for the youngsters”, along with “a watch and jewelry repair shop, a check-cash service, a bill-paying service and a soda fountain grill.”, according to a pre-opening write-up in the Los Angeles Times. To my knowledge, they never opened another one.

The clip’s closing scenes reinforce the “America, land of plenty” theme, starting with a really nice shot of a grocery store checkout lane in action. It’s interesting to note the still-familiar brand names as they whizz past the wood grain-painted metal cash register. What’s striking is how small the package sizes were in that era before “economy size” became the rule. Ironically, with manufacturers reducing package sizes as a response to the current economy, we just might be trending that way again.

From there, there’s a glimpse of the Ford Assembly Plant in Long Beach, followed by one of its General Motors counterpart in Van Nuys, two important cogs in the economic engine that helped make all of this prosperity possible. Both have long since closed, and sadly we won’t be trending that way again. Then it’s back on the open road, a fine place to be indeed.

I think next time I’m out that way I’ll try to whistle a few bars of the “insanely peppy woodwinds” theme. I’ve been practicing. Or maybe I should just stick with Randy Newman.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2012, and welcome to the start of a new year of Pleasant Family Shopping, where we revisit those great everyday places from our past – the supermarket, the discount store, the shopping center and more. Think about it – they’ve changed more than a little through the years, haven’t they?

And to start the year off right, we’ve adopted a special theme. I like to call it “ring out the old, ring in the new” for short. (Originality. The hallmark of this website.) To symbolize this, I refer you to the photo above, circa early 1971, showing the huge, brand new Safeway supermarket in Lafayette, California, replete with mansard roof, open and ready for business. (Still there, now with a Starbucks!) In front of it is the original Safeway it replaced, shortly before the older store assumed a flat, paved-over configuration, er…became a parking lot.

So that’s our theme – ring out the old…away with the pylons and pastel colors…the barrel roofs and the checkered tile floors that held us back!

And ring in the new…bring on the cedar shingles and earth tones…the Norwegian woods…the ferns and the lower-case fonts that help us to find our true inner selves.

Ok, wait a minute – sure, I like mansard roofs. Earth tones are great, and lower-case fonts have improved all of our lives, there’s scientific proof* of that. But I still like pylons, too! And pastels, barrel roofs and funky tile still move me. I can’t help it, I want ‘em both! I want it all. Now.

In fact, I’m peeved that they ever tore the old Safeway down in this case. I’m thinking a “Safeway Visitors Center” would have been the perfect use for the old store. Heck, the Starbucks could’ve been put there! Sure, people might have had to carry their groceries a block or so on busy days (when jars were glass instead of plastic), but that's not too much to ask, is it?

* According to Dave’s scientific method.

Hail the New Shopping Center!

"The stars shone just a little brighter that night. And the birds sang."

A Pay Less Northwest/Safeway combination, somewhere in Washington state, 1961.

I couldn't let February slip by with nothing new at all on here. Hoping to have the next "real" post up within a few days!

A Well Planned Safeway, 1966

Many of the retail chains featured on this site were known for an iconic look – a combination of architecture, signage and interior decoration that made their stores instantly recognizable. While this remains largely true today, one could argue that it reached a peak during the 1960’s.

Among the foremost of these would have to be Safeway, with its “Marina” design. They had a handful of other favored formats, including the “Ranch” Safeway (Low, peak-roofed stores. Maybe they had one of those in Hidden Valley, California - get it? Ok, moving right along…), but the Marina, introduced in 1959 and named for its maiden location on San Francisco’s Marina Street, is far and away the best remembered Safeway store design today. Hundreds were opened in Safeway’s vast American territories (the West, Atlantic, Southwest and Plains regions), and a number of examples sprang up in the company’s Canadian, European and Australian markets as well. The Marina stores featured floor-to-ceiling windowed facades with one of several “standard” arched rooflines - with or without upswept “side wings”, horizontal wings, etc., and a multitude of other permutations. At the briefest glance, they were unmistakably Safeways.

As much as I like the “trademark” store designs of Safeway and others , however, l love the one-of-a-kind stores these chains would occasionally open to fit into an unusual setting or meet some special architectural requirement. Depicted above, in a wonderful photo sent to me recently by Amy Bertsch, is just such a store - from 1966, the Safeway supermarket at the brand-new Lake Anne Plaza in Reston, Virginia. This photo was taken by visitors from nearby Alexandria. My sincere thanks to Amy for sharing it with us.

Amy informs us that Lake Anne Plaza was the first community in Reston, the “planned suburb” of Washington, D.C., to be completed. Intrigued, I did a brief bit of research on Reston and Lake Anne Plaza and found it very absorbing. One site in particular, the Planned Community Archives at George Mason University in nearby Fairfax, is a treasure trove, to put it mildly.

There’s way too much detail to go into here, but I’ll attempt to cover a few basics. Reston, conceived in the early sixties, was the beneficiary of experience gained by America’s earliest planned communities, including Park Forest, Illinois and the various Levittowns. Planning goals for Reston included maintaining the close proximity of homes, stores and offices (creating “an ideal place to live and work”) in a modern architectural environment, while hopefully avoiding the income and class stratification that became so closely associated with the aforementioned towns.

Whether they succeeded in the latter goal is hard to say, but the modern architecture of Reston (and Lake Anne Plaza in particular) is now widely recognized as a true mid-century modern classic. The master plan for Reston, completed in 1963, was developed by acclaimed architect James Rossant, whose firm also designed the buildings in Lake Anne Plaza. Additionally, Rossant was an accomplished artist who personally designed the Brutalist sculptures that adorned the Plaza’s courtyards and fountains. In 1982, Lake Anne Plaza was declared a historic district. Through the years, his firm remained active there, overseeing a major renovation some of the Plaza’s key buildings and sculptures a few years back. Mr. Rossant passed away in December of last year at the age of 81.

The Safeway, now gone, was a vital part of the Lake Anne community in earlier years. An early 70’s Lake Anne promotional brochure, archived on the GMU site, spotlights a middle-aged couple who regularly traveled to the store by boat, for example - a sure-fire way to keep the romantic flames glowing. The store’s restrained signage, the polar opposite of 70-foot-tall tower signs, is very appealing in its own right, and I got a particular kick out of seeing the famous Safeway font and “S” logo rendered in black and white - a very classy touch!

At some point though, as the photo below (shown here through the kind courtesy of the Planned Community Archives, Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University Libraries) shows, the signs were changed from monochrome to the very familiar red and white. Perhaps the company felt the need to ramp up the branding power a bit.

Or maybe the whole thing was just a Wizard of Oz-like dream sequence: “Oh, it was beautiful! There was snow everywhere – and the Safeway signs were all in color – and you, and you, and you, and you were there!!”

But I guess the first scenario seems more likely, doesn't it?

The Subtleties of Signage

I don’t know about you, but I find the gaudy retail signs of recent years to be a real turn-off. Today's four-foot tall wooden eyesores or stacked-stone monstrosities always leave me longing for a simpler time - when understatement was the word of the day.

Take the sign shown above, for example. Notice how the gentle earth tones, orange and green, blend seamlessly into the surrounding landscape. You can almost hear the conversations that must have taken place…”You know, I’ve been gazing at that hillside for the last ten minutes or so…did you realize there was a Sears there?”

The main function of a sign is to inform, and this one does that beautifully. Its message is simple: “Everyone needs food, and most of us need something from the pharmacy now and then. Go no further. You can find these necessities right here.”

The best signs are like négligées… you barely know they’re there…

This well-known shopping center’s sign extends a warm invitation: “Welcome to Gulfgate. I’m safe - be at ease. Shop as long as you’d like - go home when you please.”

Now, a little background information on the photos, in the event you're curious: (1) Searstown Shopping Center, Winchester Road, Cumberland/La Vale, Maryland. Opened May 1, 1963. Height, 80 feet tall. From an advertisement for DuPont’s Lucite plastics. (2) Shoppers Square Shopping Center, South Virginia and East Plumb Lane, Reno, Nevada, opened November 5, 1964. The “Skaggs” portion of the sign featured blue lettering on a white background, the “Mayfair” portion, white on red. Height, 72 feet tall. From a 1965 Signs of the Times feature article. (3) Safeway, somewhere in Utah, mid-1960’s. Height, really really tall. From an ad for Dynapac rotating motors. (4) Gulfgate Shopping City, intersection of Interstates 45 (the "Gulf Freeway”) and 610 (“The Loop”), Houston, Texas. The shopping center was opened on September 20, 1956, but the earliest aerial photos I’ve seen do not show this sign. Later known as Gulfgate Mall, it was enclosed in 1967, then torn down and completely redeveloped starting in 2001. The sign still exists in modified form. Height, super mega tall. From an ad for another rotating motor firm, Specialty Engineering and Manufacturing Company.

Remembering JFK, 45 Years Later

The photograph above was taken in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, 45 years ago today. It depicts President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline, along with Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie en route from Love Field Airport to the Dallas Trade Mart, where the president was scheduled to give a speech. The photo was taken at approximately 12:25 pm, as the motorcade passed in front of a new Safeway store at 3707 Lemmon Avenue. Just minutes later, the limousine would make its fateful turn into Dealey Plaza, and the course of history would be forever changed.

This photo was taken by Safeway Dallas Division employee Jack Zeller, who was assigned to follow up on the Lemmon Avenue store’s grand opening which had taken place the day before. Zeller had his camera along to take pictures of the new store for the company magazine. The president’s motorcade route and approximate timing had been published days earlier in the Dallas papers (something that would never happen today), and in a bit of serendipity, would pass right in front of the Safeway. As you can see, he managed to capture a fine picture as the Lincoln Continental passed in front of the store.

If anyone finds this combination of retail history and that tragic moment in American life to be in poor taste, please forgive me. I do think, however, that there is something moving and patriotic in the fact that one would be proud enough of the president to want to photograph him in front of their business. And it reinforces my appreciation of the risk our presidents assume in interacting with the public, even with today’s far stricter security practices.

I can remember the sense of pride I felt (and still feel, when I think about it) in grade school at having been born during the Kennedy administration. Our class was roughly split between Kennedy and Johnson era babies. More than once it came up as a topic of conversation in class, although certainly none of us had any personal memories of his presidency - just some facts, our parents’ memories, and exposure to the growing Kennedy legend. To be sure, this admiration was by no means limited to those of us born during his presidency.

Would President Kennedy be revered in the same way had he lived to finish his term, or been reelected in 1964, or if he were still alive today at age 91? I’m not sure that’s even possible. Then as now, the country faced monumental challenges, including the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights, just to begin a list. More likely, he would have ended up with the mixed legacy that most presidents seem to have. But perhaps he would be. Who’s to say?

One thing is assured - that John F. Kennedy stands as a symbol of America’s promise, forever young and vibrant, frozen in time.

Pictured below is a similar scene from a happier day. Taken on March 23, 1962, President Kennedy’s motorcade is shown passing the Berkeley, California Safeway en route to the University of California to accept an honorary degree and speak at the University’s Charter Day ceremonies at Memorial Stadium. Over 93,000 people were on hand for the speech – a record for both the University and the President.

The Safeway in Winter

Here’s a nice winter scene for early January – the brand new Leadville, Colorado Safeway, which opened in December 1971, is shown here in a photo taken soon afterward. There’s plentiful snow on the peaks – both the majestic Rocky Mountains in the background and the store’s own peak – the shallow, sloped roof that became one of Safeway’s stalwart designs in the early 1970’s. A simple design, but certainly very attractive in this context.

Safeway's Season's Greetings

An 80-foot tall sequoia becomes a majestic Christmas tree in this 1965 Lake Oswego, Oregon view. Safeway endeared itself to the local community by sparing the tree when constructing their new marina-style store. When they subsequently sprung for annual lighting of the tree and appearances by Santa Claus, who would have shopped anywhere else?

Thanks to "Sputnikmoss" of the Portland Area Mid-Century Modern League for informing us that both the store and the tree still exist, at 401 A Avenue, Lake Oswego, Oregon. And they still feature the annual tree lighting celebration with Santa Claus!

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.

Safeway Sixties Style

Through the 1960’s, Safeway continued to pursue Chairman Robert Magowan’s oft-expressed objective of maintaining an aggressive store building and modernization program. During this period, usually 60 percent or more of Safeway’s stores were under ten years old - no mean achievement for a chain of that size. The comparatively tiny, white-painted Safeway stores of the 30’s and 40’s were an all-but-distant memory. A great many of the distinctive pyloned stores that had replaced them in the early and mid-50’s were themselves radically remodeled and expanded or replaced altogether by modern, much larger stores, often on the same site. Even though Safeway’s overall U.S. store count dropped by roughly 10 percent through the sixties, the chain’s overall square footage greatly increased, a trend shared with several other major supermarket chains.

Safeway utilized a number of architectural styles throughout the sixties, the first versions of many of them having “premiered” in 1959 or so. The most notable of these styles can conveniently be called the “Marina Family” of designs, after the company’s signature “Marina Safeway”, which opened in San Francisco in 1959. Although most (but certainly not all) subsequent marina-type stores were less elaborate than this first store, with its mosaics and four-foot wide louvered sunshades, the influence is obvious. The marina style generally consisted of a curved roofline and glass across most of the storefront except for a small section on the sides, which were usually finished in stone, wood or mosaic tile and most often sported the red and white round “S” Safeway logo. There were several basic variations of the marina theme (hence the “family” designation), which are most easily distinguished by the curvature of the roofline.

Many Safeway stores featured a low-slung peaked roof that Progressive Grocer magazine generically termed a “ranch-type design”.

The company also designed a wide variety of stores to meet local architectural standards, and this practice yielded many interesting designs – “Colonial Williamsburg” style buildings, rustic western-style exteriors, stores sporting historical murals of local significance (this category also included some of the marina-style buildings) and other one-of-a-kind designs intended to blend in with adjacent shopping centers. To be sure, however, many shopping centers of the era were content to present a “mix-n-match” appearance.

Then, there were stores that by Safeway standards were of very conventional design, with flat roofs and a minimum of architectural frills. Even these stores, in my opinion, had a classy, understated look that clearly identified them with Safeway.

As far as their overall business was concerned, the 1960’s saw a continuation of Safeway’s remarkable growth, the entrance into some new markets and exit from others. In 1960, Safeway opened its first store in Alaska, and in 1963, they reentered Hawaii after a 29-year absence with a new store in Honolulu. In 1961, the company ended its 20-year long presence in the underperforming New York-New Jersey market with the sale of around 160 area supermarkets to First National Stores. Magowan stated that the company’s intention was to use the funds from the First National transaction to build additional stores in the West, “where growth is assured”, as he was quoted in Time Magazine. The early sixties also saw Safeway’s entry into the UK, West Germany and Australia, all initially by acquisition of existing local chains. Many of these early European and Australian Safeways are very charming in that they were converted from existing, sometimes very old stores in picturesque old-world street settings. The stores that Safeway would build in those areas in the coming years often closely resembled their American and Canadian counterparts which were, of course, also charming.

The following stores are pictured, top to bottom: A 1963 Marina-style store with historical murals in Ashland, Oregon honoring a famous local Shakespearean theatre, another Marina-style from Honolulu, also from 1963 (the first Hawaiian Safeway in nearly three decades) , a "ranch-style" store in Alamo, CA from 1968, a Colonial-style from Richmond, VA in 1959, a unique design featuring historical murals in Santa Barbara from '59 as well (now a Vons and still looking good at 34 W. Victoria St in SB, thanks for the tip, Ed!), another '59 shot, this one a shopping center special in Independence, Missouri, an unusual design from in a 1965 Oakland location (which was actually a newly renovated 1950's era store) and a conventional flat-roofed store in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada from 1968.

Checkout Time

In this idyllic circa 1968 scene, a family is ready to head for home with a fine haul of Safeway-branded merchandise. The young lad seems to be playing a little tug of war with the cashier, who doesn't appear to be amused...or maybe she was about to break out in a big smile. The store decor is late 60's state-of-the-art for Safeway.

Safeway's Windmill?

This photo (from 1963, location unknown) is intriguing to me for a couple of reasons – first, because it shows the “March of Progress” – a classic 50’s Safeway about to realize its destiny as a parking lot for the brand-new, gleaming Safeway/Super S store seen under construction in the background. On the new store, the plastic insert for the round, red “S” logo isn’t even installed yet!

Secondly, because of the famous Van de Kamp’s windmill sign on the pylon of the older store. Out of the many vintage Safeway photos I’ve seen, this is a first. As anyone who grew up in pre-1970 Southern California knows, the windmill signs were a fixture (literally) of grocery store facades all over the region. Vons, Thriftimart, Market Basket, A & P (before they cleared out of L.A. in the early 60’s), Food Giant and many others all featured Van de Kamp’s bakery departments and thus sported the familiar sign. In the couple of vintage film clips I’ve seen of them, the windmill blades really did turn, though I’m not sure if it was purely from the wind or with the assistance of a small electric motor.

I’ve always assumed that Safeway did their own baking for their stores. If someone knows the backstory on this, please let us know!

(Thanks to the sharp-eyed PFS reader who identified this store's location - at the corner of 3rd and Vermont in L.A. - now a Vons.)

Safeway's Super S Story

In the early 1960’s, several leading supermarket chains began a concerted effort to augment their traditionally razor-thin grocery margins by greatly increasing their offering of non-food items. Typically, this category included outdoor accessories, sporting goods, cameras, small appliances, basic clothing and a host of other items, which were usually marked-up at more than twice the rate of food products.

This trend was accelerated with the introduction of the “food/drug combination store” – essentially two adjoining stores - by such chains as Albertsons of Boise, Idaho and Jewel Food Stores of Chicago in the opening years of the decade. Safeway, far larger than either of these two companies, jumped into the fray in October 1962 with the establishment of their “Super S” division. The Super S stores would be newly constructed units, built in conjunction with an adjoining new Safeway. The two stores would share an entrance portal between them, but would be operated as separate businesses with their own checkstands. Super S would sell the products mentioned above, in addition to health and beauty products, and each unit would feature a full-service pharmacy. The stated goal was to have the first combination Safeway/Super S store open during the following March in Anchorage, Alaska (hey, why not?) with a total of five stores to be opened in 1963. Six stores were actually opened that year, with 22 more following in 1964.

Surprisingly, especially given Safeway’s outstanding overall performance throughout the period, the Super S stores were not a successful venture. In 1965, twenty-three new Safeway/Super S stores were opened. That same year, however, 22 of the existing (and still very new) Super S units were sold off to Salt Lake City-based Skaggs Drug Centers, Inc., in a transaction that included all Super S’s east of the state of California except for two Washington, D.C. stores. The adjoining Safeways continued to operate. By 1969, the Super S store count was stagnant at 30 stores, and in 1971 the balance of the Super S stores were disposed of.

I surmise that one factor involved in the failure of the Super S concept was the fact that they were separated by a full-length wall from the Safeway, save for the relatively small entrance portal between them. To me, this arrangement could only serve to discourage customers from wandering the second store after they had completed their purchases from the first. In Chicago, for example, the Jewel/Osco combination stores (which have been successful for 45 years now) had no such wall (*see comments), and any item from either store can be purchased at the Osco counter or any of the Jewel checkstands. Most Jewel/Osco stores opened in recent decades in fact share checkstands.

Sadly, the ultimate advantage to this divided arrangement, then, was to facilitate the conversion of the Super S operations to a Skaggs or other successor brand.

As the years have rolled on, of course, Safeway’s store footprints and product offerings have grown tremendously, and undoubtedly most products once sold at the Super S stores can today be found under the roof of a regular Safeway. All’s well that ends well.

The top photo, from 1964, features a Safeway/Super S from San Jose. The other three photos are Super S interiors from a slightly older store in Carmichael, California.

Safeway Fifties Style

The three photos above are of new Safeway stores opened in 1955, a very significant year in Safeway's 40-year long (at that point) history. In October 1955, longtime Safeway President Lingan A. Warren stepped down. Warren, as a Time magazine article put it, “built Safeway from nothing” during his 21 years at the chain’s helm. By the mid-50’s, however, despite store growth that would be impressive by any standard, profits were low as a result of Warren's pricing policies, and Safeway stockholders were restless. Enter Robert Magowan, a onetime Warren assistant and more recently a top manager at brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. Magowan, a dynamic, hard charging, customer-oriented executive also happened to have an important personal connection. He was the son-in-law of Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch, who personally controlled a huge block of Safeway stock.

Magowan began by, among other things, reversing two key Warren policies – a “to the death” resistance to trading stamps and a reluctance to move Safeway into shopping centers. Both moves, particularly the embrace of the booming shopping center movement, helped to catapult Safeway to new heights. By 1958, only three years into Magowan’s reign, Safeway’s profits were at the top of the heap in the supermarket industry.

These three stalwart examples of classic Safeway 50’s architecture are (top to bottom) from Walnut Creek, California, Phoenix, and Mill Valley, California. Mount Tamalpais looms in the background in the third photo.

Safeway's Wonderful World of Color

“Color does brighten things up, doesn’t it?” Walt Disney asked the television audience in the opening minutes of his first Color TV broadcast in 1961. Well, it was true for Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color”, and it was also true for Safeway and many other leading supermarket chains throughout the 1950’s and into the early 60’s. Pastel colors were used to great effect in this 1953 Portland, Oregon Safeway, which also features signage the company would use as a standard in its stores for more than a decade. The different colors allowed easy identification of departments and created an illusion of space in an era when most supermarkets still averaged 15,000 square feet or less.

As the sixties wore on, Safeway changed to deeper, darker shades for their standard color scheme. Many others who had used a pastel scheme did the same, or switched to one or more of a much wider variety of wall finishes, including paneling, wallpaper, mosaics, murals – you name it.

...And Don't Forget The Coffee!

Gotta have that flavor lift... Here's another 1945 photo, this one featuring a gentle reminder outside a San Francisco Safeway. Edwards was Safeway's longtime house brand. The billboard looks bigger than the store itself!

Safeway Upgraded

It would be understandable to assume that civic design approval for retail stores is a fairly recent thing – a phenomenon of the past 25 to 30 years only, or perhaps dating as far back as the mid-60’s, when Lady Bird Johnson’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign ushered in a new, austere (shudder) era of retail architecture.

The interesting fact is that there are examples of appearance zoning that go back much earlier than this, and many of these early results were pretty nice looking. Pictured above are two Safeway stores from 1945. The top photo features the ubiquitous standard Safeway design – cement outer construction, painted white, with the famous yellow and red porcelain-coated signage. Many hundreds of these stores were built throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. The second store is an attractive example of an effort on Safeway’s part to blend in with the local area. The brick and Spanish tile are striking, and the subtle signage (while maintaining Safeway’s trademark typeface) is icing on the cake. In all likelihood, these stores were alike in every other respect. The front glass and door arrangements appear to be identical, right down to the little “Safeway” decal to the left of the doors.

Just a few notes on Safeway at the time these stores were opened – the chain had 2,442 stores in 23 states, Washington D.C., and Canada and were a key factor in the Western, Southwestern, Eastern, and Plains States’ grocery markets. They were by far the dominant grocery retailing concern on their home turf of Northern California.

Their Own Private Idaho

Long before Albertsons became a national name in grocery retailing, it was a powerhouse in the Pacific Northwest. The history of Albertsons started in Boise, Idaho in 1939 when former Safeway manager Joe Albertson formed a partnership with L.S. Skaggs (of Safeway founding family fame) and accountant Tom Cuthbert. Though the partnership would not last long, Albertson would build his company at a rapid clip in the coming decades, racking up a store count of nearly 100 units by the time the store pictured above was opened in 1961.

Probably the most common design associated with early 60's Albertsons stores is the arched-roof "marina" style of architecture with the "Albertsons" name rendered in old west-style lettering against individual white rectangular backgrounds across the expansive glass facade of the store. The fact is that the company used quite a number of prototype designs during this period, including this beauty, which was located in the Franklin Shopping Center in Boise. It's a nice pre-opening shot -note the glass manufacturer's stickers still attached to each pane!

(Note: A reader has kindly updated us on the current status -the Franklin Shopping Center, at the NW corner of Orchard and Franklin Streets, has been demolished and a swank Fred Meyer occupies the site today.)