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You beat me to the pic and the mislabeling on the map. #1 is an apartment bulding with commercial on the 1st floor. #2 is the old Grand Union/Giant. BTW--I've lived within blocks of this store twice: '90-95 and now for the past 6 months. No one calls it "the Spanish Safeway". The clientele...

I live a few blocks from these stores. I'll try to get a pic of the current view. The Giant began as a Grand Union and then was bought by Giant when Grand Union left the market. The pci dates from at least the 80s. It closed in '89 or '90 and the space was reconfigured into smaller shops. The parkin...

Stop off in Cleveland to see Shaker Square, one of several complexes that share the claim to be the first planned shopping center. There is a 40s supermarket on Van Aken Road in the newer section of the complex. Cedar Center (Cedar & Warrensville Center Road), which began pre-WWII is undergoing ...

What is your evidence that they were there in '64? Everything I've read suggests that First National bought the entire New York division and that they did it well before '64. Something like the Moody's industrial manual would have a listing. The division was a chronic money loser for Safeway and its...

Safeway was gone from NYC before the Marina was introduced. They sold their stores to First National--according to this iste, it was in '58;although I think it was more like '61. Either way, it's unlikely to have been a Safeway. Lots of other chains used barrel vault ceilings and you can find non-Sa...

Most chains were building 15,000 sf stores in the mid/late-50s, including Kroger. A&Ps were sometimes smaller, esp. in urban neighborhoods. A Kroger would probably have left label scars from neon-lit lettering on one side and a big rectangular metal sign on another--freestanding Krogers from tha...

There used to be a document online from a court case that laid out some history of super markets (including various early, unrelated Big Bears), but I couldn't find it today. I bring this up because it tells the story of how Michael Cullen took the idea of super marketing (although he wasn't the fir...

Kroger stores of that era usually didn't have a pylon. Sometimes, they used a raised rectangular metal sign on top of a store (other chains did something like this, too, including A&P). Colonial sometimes used pylons, but there's no evidence of their corrugated metal, plus the entry is different...

Ralphs used to have their own Vodka, too. Liquor stores still often have house brand cheap liquor.

Ohrbach's sold cheap knock offs of trendy fashions. They must have used their product placement on tv shows (lots of sitcom moms had Ohrbach clothes) to cultivate an image for the tourist trade. The New York stores closed before the ones in LA and I think there may have been some differences in owne...

"Park & Shop" was the name used for some early plazas in other cities. The 1939 "Park & Shop" on Connecticut Avenue at Ordway in Washington, DC's Cleveland Park neighborhood is still in use and its 1990s remodling kept it true to the original architecture.

Thanks for the update. One correction: Kroger was in Atlanta as early as the 1930s. The first store opened in 1932 in the Virginia Highland area. As in some other cities, they expanded by buying the local Piggly Wiggly operator. Given that Atlanta was down the Dixie Hwy from Cinti, it makes sense th...

Re: "Safeway, A&P, & Kroger---They may have been the biggest overall, but they often were secondary players even in their main territories. People remember where they or their families shopped, which often were local or regional chains. Native Washingtonians will recall hometown Giant m...

Re: Upthread--PG Plaza had a Grand Union in the early 70s. It was a relatively large store for that era. I don't recall which end of the center. Probably the West, as I think Murphy's was the end store for the east. Hecht's, like most of the May chains, had auto centers. They started out as "Fa...

Re: upthread---Kroger was a latecomer to full service delis. Kroger stores in Northern markets like Cleveland, Chicago & Pittsburgh had been outmoded, compared with the competition for many years before they opened the superstores. Some supermarket chains had these in the 1950s. The Fisher Foods...