This store's entryway is incredibly vintage, between the unpainted flagstone walls and the automatic swinging doors (a very rare sight at Safeway, which seems to have been an early adopter of sliding doors compared to chains like Albertsons). The doors themselves seem to have been modernized at some point, swapping the pressure pads out for modern motion sensors, but that's no surprise -- I can't imagine it's easy to keep 60-year-old doors working! Even the railings separating the doors look quite retro, though it's hard to say whether they're original or not.
Oddly enough, when I think of Safeway, I think of swinging doors! That's because many of our original Safeway stores here in Houston did have swinging doors just like most grocers at the time did. Perhaps Safeway did a lot of renovations in the 1990s or 2000s to replace the swinging doors with sliding doors, but that was long after Safeway left Texas the first time around. I think most Randall's stores have sliding doors, but Randall's may have had those before Safeway bought out Randall's and Safeway did entryway renovations to some of the older Randall's stores after they bought them.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think of my local 1980s Safeway, I don't remember now if it had a swinging or sliding door. The Food Town operating in that building now has a sliding door, but that could have been added sometime in the 30+ years since Safeway left. I know that some other, older Safeway buildings did have the swinging doors.
This Market Basket in Beaumont has a similar design to what the 1980s Safeway near me had, but the exterior has been untouched basically since AppleTree ran the store in the early 1990s (AppleTree was a local continuation of Safeway stores after Safeway pulled out in 1987). The Market Basket appears to still have swinging doors. If you look carefully, you may also notice that Market Basket is still using carts with flip-up baskets and gates on the front of the cart so checkers can just pull items right off the cart instead of using a conveyor belt! Link: https://goo.gl/maps/VFR4PcZyHem7QjJ5A
Here are a couple of 1980s videos from Dallas Safeways showing their swinging doors. The second store may have had both swinging and sliding doors:
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1180078/m1/
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc983503/m1/
In terms of flagstone walls, you might enjoy this new page that Mike put on HHR recently discussing Handy Andy's brief attempt at the Houston market and their somewhat revolutionary 'ranch home' design using flagstones. 2022 is the 50th anniversary of Handy Andy's arrival in Houston and I think Mike will have more articles about the remaining two Randall's that started out as Handy Andy ranch style stores (one of which is my local Randall's and the other is actually the last Randall's I've been to). The flagstone is still visible at these stores even with Safeway's renovations. In some ways, the design of these stores with the gable roof is somewhat similar even though these Safeways weren't designed to look like houses on the sides/rear. My local Randall's has more of the house look now than the one Mike took photos of for the post.
https://houstonhistoricretail.com/grocery/handy-andy/
Yes, Safeway definitely used to use swinging doors, it's just that they've taken them out of pretty much all of their stores (except Albertsons conversions), even absolutely ancient stores, so it's a little strange to still see them here!
DeleteLooks like those stores would have been pretty nice back in the day -- it's too bad they've been modified so much on the outside, and the inside, with those crazy low ceilings, is certainly not the greatest design. (The thing that makes Marina and Marina-like Safeways so impressive, in my opinion, is the very high ceilings that they have, with even the side departments outside of the arch/gable having decent ceiling heights.)