Everyone has a familiar item or landmark that they look for in an unfamiliar city, and for me they often are the grocery stores. As suppliers of a crucial commodity—food—they're edifices of a community often taken for granted. Stores often follow distinctive architectural styles per their respective chains' conventions, and the chains that exist in a city—or don't exist, or don't exist anymore—came to be that way through the crossroads of geography and ruthless corporate pursuit.
As recently as five years ago, Winnipeg still featured two operational Safeway stores in the arch-roofed "Marina" motif of the 1960s. Due to Safeway's present-day corporate foibles, however, that's no longer the case: The last survivor on 1441 Main Street morphed into a Co-op store a year ago. Happily, little else about it has changed: The store still sells groceries, and the original ceiling beams and entrance details have been preserved.
The 1081 Ellice Avenue location was less lucky, as it closed in 2010 and the building subsequently gutted and re-fronted for a new tenant. The arched roof is still clearly visible, though.
Over on 1319 Pembina Highway, the original Safeway building was replaced by a nondescript structure long ago. But happily, the original googie sign by the roadside still stands...albeit modified and shorn of flash.
All three of these stores (or the remnants thereof) date to 1963-64.
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