Heading to the front of the liquor department, we get back to the newly-enclosed produce prep department, which also now has a random bit of drop ceiling floating above it. I suppose there was always a drop ceiling here, but originally it had a soffit around it, so it didn't look quite so weird. I suppose this made it easier to have ventilation and lighting for the food prep area, so it makes sense, but it just looks rather awkward!
Wow, just wow! I've never seen such a random drop ceiling before. I kind of hope that I never see anything like it again either, this is just too weird! I know some stores have hybrid ceilings, but I just don't see the point of this for such a small sliver of the store and everything is visible between the roof and the drop ceiling anyway so I don't really see the point. Maybe they had to use a drop ceiling due to the way the ducting was and they didn't want to pay to re-do the ducting? I don't know.
ReplyDeleteI hope you don't mind the shameless plug, but I did complete my blog post about the annual reports and it was published at the Houston Historic Retail blog this morning. Oddly enough, the inspiration for that post came from our brief discussion about Egghead Software being based in the NW! You may notice that I included a link to your Bon Macy's post under the Federated/May/Allied Stores section. You'll probably want to check out that 1975 Allied Stores annual report that has the listing of all of the NW's Bon Marché stores with their store sizes as well. Who knew the Tacoma Bon Marché was so large as well? Well, maybe that's not a surprise to anyone in the NW, but it is a surprise to me, lol.
The 1975 Allied Stores annual report might be of interest to Retail Retell as well as it has the store sizes for the three Almart discount stores in Memphis. Almart, like Globe, is one of the stranger, less-known discount stores and the Memphis area had both Almart and Globe!
Oh, I also mentioned the White Front stores in my post. Those were too cool not to mention even though it had absolutely nothing to do with Houston retail other than them having the same parent as Toys R Us!
Anyway, I hope you like this blog post that you helped inspire. If you don't like it, well, you can claim that you've never heard of Egghead Software, lol.
https://houstonhistoricretail.com/2021/05/12/through-the-annals-a-guide-to-retail-history-in-annual-reports/
Yep, it's quite unusual -- but then again, so is having a little bit of the back room right in the middle of the salesfloor! It's no surprise that Fred Meyer had been moving these things to the actual back room, but I guess they decided to go cheap here and leave it in place.
DeleteThe Tacoma, Northgate, and Southcenter (Tukwila) stores are quite interesting, and my favorite Bon Marche stores out there with their extremely mid-century aesthetic. Heck, that one might just be my favorite building in the Seattle area! That view I linked is certainly one of my earliest memories, as my grandparents lived in the area when I was very young. Those three were flagship stores of sorts back then, as they anchored malls that had been developed by Allied Stores itself -- that's why they're so large! Sadly, the Northgate one (which was a bit different, having been expanded from an older store) is gone now (it's the site of the Kraken hockey training facility), but the other two are still around.
Lots of cool stuff in that post, and I think the White Front thing was my favorite part! Thanks for the link, too!
I'm not sure what Fred Meyer was thinking with that drop ceiling there. They must have had their heads in the clouds, or the drop ceiling?, when they decided that was a good idea, lol.
DeleteThe columns on that Tukwila Bon Macy's are pretty impressive. It kind of reminds me a bit of the Sanger-Harris stores that became Foley's and later Macy's in the Dallas area, but even those only had partial columns. https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4lVpioKOYa8/VlQpmaHliAI/AAAAAAAAP40/1yWoWyhfkB4/s1600/20150904_130837.jpg
I didn't realize Allied Stores built those malls in the NW. Federated built a couple of malls here in Houston, Greenspoint Mall and West Oaks Mall. Both are still alive as malls, but both are really, really struggling and have been for a long time now. Greenspoint was a hot mall through the early 1990s, but West Oaks was kind of a born loser. Federated certainly didn't have as much success building malls here as Sears/Homart did as all four the Houston Sears-built malls are still healthy even if Sears is gone from all of them.
I figured you if anyone would appreciate the White Front section, lol. Those Interstate annual reports have more White Front photos than the ones I posted, but I wanted to leave some things for people to explore by looking at the annual reports themselves. Maybe I mentioned this to you before, but the Safeway annual reports are really, really good. You should check them out. The 1960s ones, but even the later ones, have some great Marina store images. I tried to focus my passage about Safeway on the years that they have been in Houston, but there's a lot more there that might be relevant to you.
Although I have not explored the Nordstrom and Costco annual reports, I did include links to them. I thought about posting the Eagle ones as well, but most people here probably have never heard of them and might confuse them for the Eagle (Lucky) supermarkets we had here that I mentioned in the post. But, yeah, I tried to give the post a bit of a NW flavor, lol.
That random drop ceiling looks awful. They could have at least put up a half wall to make it look less awkward
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't get it. Before the remodel, there were walls that went all the way from the drop ceiling to the real ceiling, which still didn't look great, but probably less weird than this.
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