Around the corner, the flagstone walls continue for a while, followed by a section of patterned concrete block. This specific pattern isn't one I've seen frequently, but Safeway sure loved using different patterns and styles of concrete block to make their buildings look a lot less bland -- they did that for decades, all the way from the early post-Marina days through to the "brick and block" stores of the early 00s, only dropping it with the Lifestyle-built stores of the late 00s.
Anyway, that's it for this one -- time for an "anniversary special" series next week!
Ha, around here, Safeway liked to use river rock walls! While you might think river rock is less bland than regular walls, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd rather take regular walls over river rock walls, lol. That side parking like that was most certainly something Safeway liked to do in Houston as well (my local Safeway had it, and still does as a Food Town). One thing we have in common with this Safeway is that people tend to park badly on those side parking spots for whatever reason.
ReplyDeleteYikes, a Hummer H2! I have not seen one of those in a long time. As hideous as those were, those, along with the high gas prices of the late 2000s, led to a rather short-lived period where SUVs in general started to fall out of fashion from around 2008-2014 or so. Maybe it was even a little later than 2014, but, maybe we can thank those Hummers for a brief respite in bad automotive trends. I'm kind of hoping that the Cyber Truck and the new electric Hummer might do the same for SUVs as what the Hummer H2 did, but that seems unlikely!
Anyway, if the lack of Subarus didn't clue one in that this is near Tacoma, surely the Hummer will! That said, Tacoma does have a nice car museum (hopefully without any Hummers!). On that note, there is some Seattle retail (well, restaurant) news here in my local area! It seems a Seattle restaurant, Derby Restaurant, which doubles as a fine car gallery (2233 6th Ave South Seattle, WA 98134), has decided to open locations in Dallas and Houston. Don't ask me why a restaurant in Seattle would skip over the rest of the country and end up in Texas, but then I guess we had Herfy's locations back in the day!
The location in Houston opened a couple of months ago and is located near my local mall, Willowbrook Mall, in an old Academy Sports & Outdoors sporting goods store (Academy moved to a larger location across the street many years ago). It seems like kind of an odd thing to fill dead big box retail space and I don't know how well this is going to work out. Derby's Houston menu has something called a 'Gulf Coast Sandwich' which has cod, shrimp, slaw, a heirloom tomato, and something called 'sauce Galveston'. I have no idea what 'sauce Galveston' is and isn't cod a cold water fish? I'm not entirely sure what is so 'Gulf Coast' about that sandwich, but I suppose maybe they can fool some Houstonians into thinking that is! We'll see!
I don't mind flagstone walls like this, but I've never been a fan of river rock/pebblecrete walls! It's just a personal issue of mine.
DeleteI've been seeing quite a few Cybertrucks around and saw one of those Hummer EV pickups today (only the second time, and I've never seen the SUV version) -- they're both quite awful, but probably not as bad as the old Hummer H2 by virtue of at least not using insane amounts of gas! The Hummer EV is just as heavy and inefficient as the original, though, so that's not great.
Interesting, I've never even heard of Derby! I guess that's not surprising, since I'm not particularly interested in restaurants, cars, or SoDo. Looks like it's a part of The Shop, which I had heard of (for some reason). Port Angeles had Derby beat by years, with a restaurant and classic car shop in the original Saar's Marketplace. It's definitely odd for a Seattle business to suddenly expand to Texas -- I wonder if it's a political thing 🫤