The subject today is a small H-E-B Pantry store in the Heights. It lost the Pantry name several years ago and now shares the same name as it does with its brethren, except it's a tiny little store that has nothing. Literally nothing. There's a booth for customer service, it has most of your dry dairy goods and a produce department, but no pharmacy, no florist, no seafood counter, no bakery, no tortilla machine, no sushi, no deli! This is the same chain that opened a store with the same name just earlier this month with a full restaurant, a wall of live plants, and 600 types of yogurt. It's as if Wegmans operated stores out of "Super Saver" era Acme storefronts missing most of the departments.
Sadly, once again, I lack interior pictures partly because the interior wasn't all that exciting...it used the same décor package from my c. 2002 store (only with no letters or graphics on the wall, just colorfully painted walls: I'm not sure if it's original to 1997 or not). A white guy in his mid-20s snapping pictures from an iPhone may have attracted some unwanted attention, so we'll have to do with exterior pictures. One of the things that was interesting to me was it's relatively late opening...August 1997, according to a plaque: a full five years after H-E-B started planting Pantry stores in town, and just about three years away from a full-line store opening. The August 1997 date suggests that there was another grocery store from a previous generation here.
Thanks for bringing up Acme even though this post is about Texas! I think Acme would have been a great fit for Texas in the 60's and 70's, but Safeway was pretty much its equal, so having both of them would have been redundant.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I have two off-topic questions:
1. What might have been Albertsons motivation to move their store at Jones and Bridgedown (built in 1995) to the store on the corner of 1960 and Eldridge (built in 2000), which now is a Kroger? I know Albertsons stores changed in a few ways between 1995 and 2000, but it would seem the store at Jones and Bridgedown was perfectly good, and at least could have been remodeled instead of moved. Change the ceiling to warehouse style, add a Starbucks, add an Albertsons Express (gas station) and it would have been all set to go.
2. Could the Thang Hung (Vietnamese supermarket) at Gears Road and Veterans Memorial, which I know is a former Kroger, have been a Safeway originally? It as a Kroger was very small, and looked nothing like the standard Kroger stores of any decade. Also, I suspect the empty anchor to the mostly empty (last I checked) shopping center across the street (on Veterans Memorial across from where Gears ends) was a Randalls, but have not been able to find any information on the subject.
The 2000 store did have a garden center, which the 1995 store lacked. My guess is that it was just a better location. I may not have mentioned this, but the Albertsons locations in Houston were often...strangely placed. The Bryan location, one of the last 2700 series, was in a terrible location for what Albertsons considered its demographics and merchandising, and others in Houston were badly placed. There was one in Pearland on Broadway, but between Highway 35 ("Old Pearland") and Highway 288 ("New Pearland") and not particularly convenient to either one, there was the one at Antoine and Tidwell that apparently did open as Albertsons briefly that due to the railroad tracks and visibility, even Kroger couldn't make of a go of it...T.C. Jester and West 18th was another (along with an ill-placed Kmart...not a surprise that neither store is viable retail anymore), Veterans Memorial and Beltway 8 (the retail strips to the north of that were pretty much empty even by 2001), which again Kroger failed at.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of your mystery grocery store, honestly my best guess would be a Weingarten. Weingarten was dismantled in January 1984, but Grand Union built several small stores, I know in College Station, one was built in November 1983. The stores built in this era all were small, even in the early 1980s at around 30,000 square feet. This made it less attractive for a modern supermarket to buy out (the CS one was eventually reopened as an independent, which didn't last much longer, and is now a Burke's Outlet).
HCAD puts the shopping center opening in 1983, which supports that theory.
Thanks again for your help. Speaking of that Albertsons/Kroger hidden behind the railroad tracks, the Food Town a few blocks south (at Antoine and Pinemont) is a former Safeway that may or may not have been AppleTree.
DeleteDidn't Safeway buy most (if not all) Weingarten's stores? Sometimes to the point of relocating an existing Safeway to an older former Weingarten's?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I should at least mention that I was assuming the mystery store to have been built way before 1983, perhaps in the early seventies. West Oaks Mall at 1960 and Veterans Memorial was built in 1978, but Target was not an anchor there until 1982, and it moved out around 2002.
No, according the to the 1970s aerial on Google Earth, it doesn't show up.
ReplyDelete