Across two streets from my old house on Younglove Ave., with only U Save Liquors in between, stood the sprawling monstrosity of the ancient Safeway, the Westside’s sole supermarket.
Across two streets from my old house on Younglove Ave., with only U Save Liquors in between, stood the sprawling monstrosity of the ancient Safeway, the Westside’s sole supermarket, whose fluorescent glare could be experienced, with considerable esthetic and psychic distress, deep after midnight when everything else was shut and you desperately needed a bottle of juice or a quart of ice cream that couldn’t wait till morning. I needed that Safeway only just a few nights that year I lived on Younglove just a few doors down from Mission, and was grateful then for its existence yet at the same time hated the hideousness of its terrible architecture, its gleaming pyramids of manufactured fruit and its endless aisles of tasteless packages and glaring colors of a night owl’s nightmares. Spread out on a single story across a parking lot wasteland dotted with cars at any hour, it looked to be the size of a football field and dominated the neighborhood.
This week I rode past on my Goodwill bike and found the store demolished, big Cats raking through the rubble with their steel claws, rats’ nests of dead rebar piled in twisted heaps, piles of smashed concrete waiting to be scooped up and hauled away—it reminded me of downtown after the earthquake of 89, whole buildings deemed irreparably obsolete and taken down and carted off in block-long trucks leaving strange voids after the ruins. The Safeway building too was obsolete, not only ugly but forced finally out of the last century with its herd-mentality mass nutrition by competition from newly redesigned and resurrected westside New Leaf and eastside Whole Foods pushing their new dietary paradigms and new environment- and health-obsessed mass-marketing strategies turning the herds in new directions of consumption. The new local grocery behemoths had forced sclerotic old Safeway to throw up a new store.
So behind the ruins of rubble behind the chain link protecting an about-to-be-born-again parking lot of even vaster acreage than before arises the newer, grander, even more monstrous, slightly less-horrible-looking Safeway, now open, with its organic pharmacy fired up, and fresh esthetics for the discriminating shopper, more choices and bargain-warfare for all, more food than half of Africa consumes in a year, and we of the Westside bask in an abundance of downhome produce and global imports and epic delicacies and intimate commerce with our fellow consumers. But the old Safeway, the scene of emergency munchies-relief and glaring predawn panic attacks, of mainstream shopping experience in a pre-organic epoch, is gone.
I can almost mourn as I contemplate its remains.
