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The 50s live on in Jamaica Plain
By adamg on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 10:40pm
All that's missing from MJ's photo of Hi-Lo Foods on Centre Street are some Chevy BelAirs and maybe a Nash Metropolitan or a Studebaker.
Copyright MJ.
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Comments
Always nice to see a little
Always nice to see a little Googie here and there. What was the store before it was a Hi-Lo Foods?
Finast?
I really have no clue, but F-I-N-A-S-T would certainly fit, both in terms of the sign (that odd blank tile) and the architecture, no?
And thanks for the introduction to Googie. Despite having actually lived through it, I'd never heard the term, so, of course, I did some Googie Googling. Most cool.
It was a Sklars
It was a Sklars Market.
http://www.jphs.org/20thcentury/hi-lo-for-latinos-...
Before that, it was the site of the Jamaica Theatre.
http://cinematreasures.org/theater/18581/
Dang, Finast
Now there's a supermarket chain I haven't had cause to think about in a long time. I never liked them as a kid because I knew "finest" wasn't spelled that way. Couldn't quite understand it.
Did we have "Finast" stores
Did we have "Finast" stores around here? I recall that the stores were "First National" and the store brand products were labeled "Finast", but I could be wrong.
(Never hurts to hot-link Lileks in a thread where "Googie" gets mentioned.)
Yep, Finast was around here
Which I learned when perusing the Globe archives to see if they had a store in JP (before NotWhitey told us the history of Hi-Lo).
First National/Finast
Yes, I believe you're right - Finast was the house brand but the stores were First National.
IIRC, the building that's now the Washington Street Whole Foods in Brighton was a First National. I'm less certain of this but I think there was another one where the big CVS is now, on Comm Ave a little West of Harvard. There was an A&P on Harvard, about where Wonder Bar is now, and of course the TJ Maxx on Harvard was a Purity Supreme, and before that it was New England Food Fair.
First National
Other "First National" locations that I remember from when I was a kid: Hyde Park Ave. (I think there's an "America's Food Basket" there now). Washington St./Enneking Pkwy where the Rite Aid was until recently. Dedham at Rte. 1 and Elm where the main branch of Dedham Savings and the new Walgreens are.
Remember when Sun Glory was the house brand for Stop & Shop?
Rite Aid!
Yeah, that building always looked like it started out as a supermarket, complete with that overhang (drive-up service?) on one side.
Now it's surrounded by fencing; Implosion fans can only hope that means they're going to implode the thing (although more likely it's just to keep people out as they gut the inside of a decade plus of bad floor tiling and accumulated Osco/Brooks/Rite-Aid wallpaper plus, I bet, about 73 gazillion tons of pigeon guano from the birds that used to hang out there no matter how many of those tiny little spiky things they'd adorn their signs with).
By some twist of the cosmic
By some twist of the cosmic fabric, I happened to end up on a "Space-Age Pop" page tonight, which linked to a Googie site. Dude - get out of my brain!
The old neighborhood
I wish it were possible to preserve more "Googie." So much as been lost and it's not usually a favorite of preservationist-historical types because of what it replaced.
Then there are those 50's retro establishments like fake diners in mall food courts that get it all wrong!! I've even seen real diners, in decent original state, "retrofitted" to look like fake 50's diners. If you chrome it, they will come.
If more of the real thing isn't saved, we'll just end up with horrible "Googie" imposters.