Safeway's Movement in Town Tells us Lots about Salem's History

Well, Safeway was just sold!

Would you be surprised to learn that there was a downtown Safeway for a while in the building where Shryock's is today?

Maybe more than any other kind of store, grocery stores track and index our transportation system and neighborhood development patterns, from the smaller stores of the streetcar era, to the larger stores for the post-war car and suburb, and to the big-box store near the interstate we have today.

Safeway on corner of Court and Commercial, 1938
Salem Library Historic Photos

Behind that stucco-y moderne facade of Shyrock's is a very old building!

For more on this intersection and the buildings nearby, see the note on the Moose carnival of 1913.  And for one of those Cronise scans that you can just zoom and zoom in on, see the image here of the building long before the Safeway, when it was still surrounded by wooden structures.

There were several other early Safeways of a wholly different building type as well, including the motorcycle store at Market and Broadway and the Capital Market at 14th and State. (It's not clear, though, whether they were built as Safeways or were a local chain purchased by Safeway.)

East School (later Washington School), circa 1886
on the current site of the Safeway
between 12th/13th and Marion/Center
Salem Library Historic Photos

And of course the current Safeway replaced one of Salem's first big school buildings, completed in 1886 or 1887.  And that Safeway has been wholly remodeled at least once since it was built.

There are a lot of other grocery stores from the second half of the 20th century, too.

You will recall that the old Safeway on middle Commercial was evaluated for use as a Police Station.

Vacant big box - former Safeway on Middle Commercial
(Now apparently with a pending sale or lease)

Analysis of Eugene-style Police Station
with an adaptive reuse of vacant Safeway
(These numbers have been superseded with more recent ones)

Elsewhere in town, the School District and Oregon Department of Energy both use old grocery stores converted into office space. Fitts, Santiam Wine, and the Drunken Cook have split up another - and kept the food theme.  You can probably think of other instances of adaptive reuse.  Maybe some of these were Safeway - or Albertson's stores - too.

Anyway, it's not possible to do a meaningful history of Safeway or of grocery stores generally at the moment - maybe some other time. Hopefully this will have suggested something about the way the grocery stores have moved from the center to the outer edges of the city at the same time they have grown in size.

Since they sell that essential, food, it's not surprising their history says a lot about the history of the city and its development patterns.