Here’s a building in Kensington, Maryland, a rail and streetcar suburb of D.C. built in the late 1800s:

Kensington is in Montgomery County, not far from D.C., but back then at the outer edge of the area. It’s basically an early suburb, but still retaining some small-town architectural DNA. Neat little place.

Here is the building in the first picture from the air. Look at how long and narrow it is with a little bit of dedicated parking:

You may recognize this as an architectural type. Here are a couple from New Jersey not too far from my parents’ house: one in Flemington, and one in Milford.

The answer is, supermarket! That long, narrow corner building was the first Safeway in Kensington! I can’t find the exact year it opened, and the building’s current address isn’t even in the official property search records. But the Safeway, per this photo, existed into the 1940s.

That was actually towards the end of its reign here: this forum thread says there were four Safeways in Kensington, from then to now. In the thread, there’s a photo of the second Safeway, which opened in the 1940s. It was then replaced by a “Marina” Safeway—the classic one with a barrel-vault ceiling—in 1964. And the Marina store was demolished in 2007 for a modern Safeway which now stands only a few hundred feet from the original location! At least the Marina and the modern store were on the same lot. The second one is gone and the comments suggest it stood somewhere else.

Each Safeway became more and more typically big-box suburban. It’s interesting to see that evolution happen incrementally over time.

Safeway, for some reason, has left quite a lot of vacated but still standing stores around the D.C. area, and beyond. The related reading items are all Safeways, two of them in the D.C. area!

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #16

“Excuse Me, Where’s the Car Aisle?”

Old Shells, New Life

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