This store opened in 1957, as the first of three clones of the Burien Tradewell design. It opened only a few months after the Burien store, and the other two opened not long after, so they must have been in construction or at least well along in planning by the time the first of the four opened... seeing as there were never any more stores of this design built, with Tradewell very quickly switching over to a much plainer design, which makes me wonder if there was some fatal flaw with the design that quickly became apparent, despite their architectural success. Anyway, the three clones were very much cut-down versions of the original, both in size (around half the size of Burien) and design. And, of course, much more of the original design has been lost here. I felt the need to feature this store anyway, though, as it's the most likely of the stores I'm featuring in this series to disappear in the near future, since Rite Aid has been closing stores left and right lately, especially older ones like this one. I should really start visiting more Rite Aids while they're still around, but I find them rather difficult to photograph since they tend to be smaller and have lots of staff with few customers to distract them from me, plus there are rarely pictures online so it's hard to tell which stores are actually worth visiting.
Comments
Post a Comment