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Safeway, Eastern Market, Washington DC
228 East Seventh Street SE, Washington DC (1987, Washington Post).
Opened in 1940, this Safeway store at 228 Seventh Street SE in Washington DC managed to hang on until 1986. It was still profitable until the end; the need for expensive renovations was cited as the reason for its closing. The surrounding neighborhood was not happy about the closing and the city council tried unsuccessfully to delay it through legislation.
It’s a classic 1940s store, modernized probably in the mid 1960s. The Noe Valley store in San Francisco, closed in the mid 1970s and pictured below, was probably a fairly similar renovation. I’d love to have seen the interiors of these stores. It’s amazing they lasted as long as they did.
The SF location, by the way, managed to hang on for another fifteen years as a Bell Market after Safeway moved out. It’s now an unrecognizable Walgreens. I don’t know the fate of the DC store.
1333 Castro Street, San Francisco (1973, The Streets of San Francisco).
Publix, West Palm Beach
Sorry I’ve been neglecting the journal recently. Between classes starting back up and the untimely demise of my hard drive, not to mention lots of actual paying work, I’ve been a little busy. And I’ve also been trying to concentrate on both the content and design of the site, as you may have noticed.
Soon, I hope to have lots of updates to the Safeway section, and to complete the Winston-Salem section of the site. I’m also working on photo galleries for Atlanta, Chicago, and LA. If anyone wants to contribute content (or heck, even money), please let me know.
For now, I offer this quintessentially 1970s Publix store in West Palm Beach. I’m reading a company history of Publix right now, a Christmas gift from my betrothed. It makes for a nice diversion in between texts on library database design..
American Fare
From an anniversary brochure produced by Bruno’s stores sometime around 1989, the photo above shows one of the original American Fare stores, probably the Stone Mountain Parkway store in Atlanta. American Fare was an experimental joint venture between Bruno’s Supermarkets and Kmart, and was based on the European concept of a hypermarché, the fusion of a discount department store with a supermarket.
The first of these stores opened in Atlanta in early 1989, while the second (now abandoned, pictured below) made its debut in Charlotte later the same year. A third location opened in Jackson MS a few years later. These stores marked a return for Kmart to the business of grocery retailing after more than a decade (the company had included leased grocery departments in many of its 1960s and 1970s locations) and served as something of a trial run for the later Super Kmart stores. American Fare, however, was originally a somewhat more upscale format than Super Kmart, with a more distinctive interior design scheme, not to mention brand name apparel its successor would eliminate in favor of Kmart’s standard offerings.
Bruno’s eventually sold its interest in the three American Fare locations, which were then rolled into the Super Kmart operation. The American Fare name lived on for several years afterward as Kmart’s house brand for grocery and household items.
Christmas Vacation
For my Christmas vacation, I visited a Lucky store and finally saw in person one of those murals I helped their ad agency assemble. Appropriately, the first “new Lucky” I visited was also the very first “old Lucky” I ever visited, way back in 1992: the Lakeshore Plaza store in San Francisco.
Happy Holidays
Off to Fresno to celebrate the holidays with the in-laws, maybe eat at the Chicken Pie Shop, and spend as little time as possible in San Francisco. Happy holidays to you all.
Road Trip
Just returned from a brief road trip in the environs of Washington, Baltimore, and Wilmington DE, and here are a few photos for your amusement. This wasn’t really a “research” trip, so I didn’t come back with too much.
Happy Anniversary
Today, I’m saying “Happy anniversary to me.” Eight years ago today — more or less — this site made its debut. It’s been fun, and I’d wax more nostalgic about it if I weren’t so darned busy this week.
Anyway, thanks for sticking around for so long.
Norfolk and the Tidewater Area
Interesting trip to Norfolk VA and the Tidewater area this past weekend while I was having all the domain problems. It’s a fascinating place that I plan to visit again soon for a more detailed research excursion. But here are two shots from this weekend:
The first is a former Food Fair location on Little Creek Road in Norfolk. Its exterior is quite well preserved, despite having been recycled as a Dollar Tree location. This is actually one of the first former Food Fairs I’ve actually seen “live and in person”, and I hope to visit more soon.
The second is related since it’s pretty obviously a former Food Fair-owned J.M. Fields department store. This one is apparently about to be torn down; it sits right next to the area that Virginia Beach is redeveloping as the “downtown” it never really had. I assume it’s been abandoned a long time, as it still amazingly bears the logo of the long-defunct HQ (Home Quarters) chain, which hasn’t existed in more than fifteen years, if I recall correctly.
Dotmaniac.com: Incompetence, Negligence or Just Plain Fraud?
The site seems to be back. For now. I’m busily trying to get all my domains moved the bloody hell out of the Tucows/Dotmaniac universe before something else can go wrong.
Here’s a chronology to date:
19 October: I renewed Groceteria.com on Dotmaniac’s website.
24 October: Despite being renewed, Groceteria.com “expired”, with its status changed to something called “clientHold”, which — I later found out — means that it has expired and will no longer resolve.
25-26 October: I spent the bigger part of both days trying to contact anyone who could help me. Dotmaniac never answered their phone: no voice mail, no nothing. I also tried contacting Tucows, the back-end registrar (Dotmaniac is a reseller), and got no response from them either. Groceteria had been offline for at least 36 hours when I had to leave town on Thursday, and I was pretty sure another of my sites would be gone by the time I got back on Sunday.
28 October: I was right. By Sunday, there was no Groceteria, no other site, and no email. Needless to say, no one at Tucows or Dotmaniac had gotten back to me either.
29 October: More contact attempts, more frustration. Early this afternoon, a friend of Mark‘s suggested a method that might at least get the sites back online, and it seems to have worked. I’m now trying to get all the domains transferred to a different registrar. I also filed a complaints with ICANN, the BBB, and Tucows compliance office.
I really didn’t need this right now. I’m already about as tightly wound as I can stand to be, and with this and other things hanging over me, my very much-needed “stress reducing” weekend road trip didn’t really do the trick either. I’m not a pretty sight today.
Thanks to incompetence (or just plain negligence) on the part of Dotmaniac.com, I’ve wasted countless hours, lost a fair amount of ad revenue (and a good chunk of my hard-won search engine placement), and become an ever bigger ball of stress than I was a week ago.
I’ve also discovered that you should be really careful where you register your domains, because there’s almost no oversight over the process, and you could find yourself at the mercy of a shady operator like Dotmaniac.com. These slimy losers are a part of the Interlink Network Group, located in Vancouver WA. If they ever answered their phones, you could call them up and tell them what you thought of them at 888.888.1051 or 877.744.6638. You could, if so inclined, also send them a fax at 360.571.4538. However, if you actually do business with them, you’re taking a terrible risk.