Did Safeway ever use their circa-1930 Canadian building design in the US?
Posted: 22 Sep 2021 18:45
Ever since I took my Labour Day Winnipeg trip, I've been completely infatuated by the built history of Safeway. And that infatuation extends back to the earliest moments of the chain: When Safeway entered Canada in 1929 and 1930, the vast majority of the stores that they opened were newly-built structures, intended explicitly as supermarkets and built from a single prototype. This level of consistency was without precedent in this era, yet Safeway had it in spades.
The "standard Canadian Safeway" of 1929/30 looked like this: A modest one-storey building, topped by towers and a Spanish tile roof. The towers themselves contain ornate details; specifically, trefoils and serrated shields: At least 11 of these buildings survive in Winnipeg, and I managed to snag photos of 10 of them (plus one in Selkirk and two more in northwest Ontario). Some of them had surprising staying power as well: The Safeway at 107 Regent Ave W (in Transcona, a Winnipeg "suburb" later wiped from the map) survived in operation as Safeway as late as 1961.
But my question is this: Was this building design ever built in the United States? I've never seen a US Safeway with these exact details, yet it seems hard to believe that they'd deliberately endow their Canadian subsidiary with unique architecture...especially since the Spanish tile seems like an implicit nod to the chain's southern California origins. Anyone?
The "standard Canadian Safeway" of 1929/30 looked like this: A modest one-storey building, topped by towers and a Spanish tile roof. The towers themselves contain ornate details; specifically, trefoils and serrated shields: At least 11 of these buildings survive in Winnipeg, and I managed to snag photos of 10 of them (plus one in Selkirk and two more in northwest Ontario). Some of them had surprising staying power as well: The Safeway at 107 Regent Ave W (in Transcona, a Winnipeg "suburb" later wiped from the map) survived in operation as Safeway as late as 1961.
But my question is this: Was this building design ever built in the United States? I've never seen a US Safeway with these exact details, yet it seems hard to believe that they'd deliberately endow their Canadian subsidiary with unique architecture...especially since the Spanish tile seems like an implicit nod to the chain's southern California origins. Anyone?