Just to show you how close this ancient Safeway is to the (much newer) light rail station, here's a view from the platform (with signage intentionally included) looking at the store in the background. I'm surprised this store hasn't ended up on Safeway's mixed-use redevelopment list, like the similarly ancient stores in the U District, Upper Queen Anne, and Magnolia, but development has been fairly slow around all four of the Rainier Valley stations. (Also, it's probably no coincidence that two of those three stores are in Seattle's wealthiest neighborhoods, while this is in one of the poorest.) Safeway has floated redevelopment of this store a few times, but they don't appear to have ever made official plans; they've also made comments in some news articles about wanting to keep the store open during construction, and I'm not sure how they would achieve that on this small site, so I don't see anything changing in the near future.
Has Safeway ever made use of a temporary store when a store is demolished and rebuilt in your area? I believe HEB is using such a tactic in Austin right now with one location which is being rebuilt. They've set up a temporary store in an old Safeway building of all things. I thought Mike did an HHR post about this at one time, but I can't find it now. Anyway, tear down and rebuilds aren't too common here. Usually when someone replaces a store, they build it somewhere else near the current store or maybe behind the current store. That said, things may change as the city continues to become more built-out and people are being more creative with reusing old buildings. For example, a Safeway-built era Randall's store that closed a few years ago is currently becoming a Tesla dealership. I saw a photo of the conversion today and Tesla isn't doing much to hide the Randallsness of the building, lol.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, it might be difficult to find a building to house a temporary store in an area which is quickly growing or gentrifying anyway so I guess temporary stores are probably pretty rare.
Interesting -- I've certainly never seen a temporary grocery store like that! The closest thing I've seen is temporary pharmacies, but Safeway didn't even do that with their Queen Anne redevelopment (the only store so far to get redeveloped that had a pharmacy), instead just transferring prescriptions to the Lower Queen Anne store. I can't think of anywhere in the Othello area where they would be able to put a temporary store either -- the only obvious locations would be really close to one of their other two Rainier Valley stores.
DeleteI saw that Randall's to Tesla thing on the LDI plan room a while back. Definitely an interesting one, though not the first grocery store-to-car dealership conversion I've seen!