Safeway #934 • Hedwig Village (Houston), TX
9325 Katy Freeway
Houston, TX
Opened: 1974 (according to HCAD)
Closed: January 1994 (quickly reopened as Kroger)
What's There Now: Kroger
A note about the address...this store (now a Kroger) is technically in Hedwig Village but has a Houston mailing address. This one I've actually been to, and is a bit interesting in terms of history. It was an early to mid 1970s Safeway with a floorplan of 28,000 square feet, but in 1990, AppleTree took expanded the floorplan to 46,000 square feet, making it one of the larger stores in the AppleTree stores and definitely the most modern. Unlike similar looking examples down at Gessner and Hammerly (now a Kroger) and in Bryan (later an indepedent supermarket, now closed), the store did not cluster the perishables in the center, unless Kroger reconfigured it (unlikely).
Despite the fancy signage, there isn't anything special about the Kroger today.
This store didn't originally look like this: it was a much smaller early 1970s-era Safeway until a renovation in 1990 expanded the footprint from about 28,000 to 46,000. As a result, it was one of the largest and most modern AppleTree stores in the chain, though that unfortunately didn't save it. It was based clearly after a modern Safeway prototype that Safeway had built right up to the end of when they sold out, examples exist in Bryan (now an independent supermarket) and another in Houston, also now a Kroger.
It was one of the many stores sold to Kroger in late 1993, closing and reopening in 1994. By this time, AppleTree had pared down the chain to its nicer and/or most successful stores (that being a relative term, some of the former stores were looking small and outdated even by the early/mid-1990s).
From about 2005-2008 the Katy Freeway underwent one of the largest widenings in freeway history, with dozens of buildings condemned, but surprisingly, this shopping center didn't get it (the Fiesta Mart catty-corner wasn't that lucky, losing a good chunk of its parking lot--although you could argue that they were looking for a way out, a product of a largely failed expansion to the suburbs, but I digress).
It was going to be expected that if the layout was anything like the current Village Foods in Bryan, it was going to have Kroger's standard décor package (there was no way that Kroger kept the AppleTree decor for the last twenty years). And I was kind of disappointed at the awkward layout of the store, though it looked like beer and wine was always on the left (no interior pictures, sorry).
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