"Excuse Me, Where's the Car Aisle?"

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #45

Today we’re outside Seattle, at a Toyota dealership. This is nothing really wacky, but car dealerships inhabiting pre-existing buildings (other than former car dealerships of another brand) are unusual, so this caught my attention.

Here’s the building as it looks today, which, to be honest, gives you little or no clue as to its history from this vantage point:

The immediate location of this Toyota dealer, however, might give you a clue:

Yep, that’s a strip mall: a strip mall, most of which has been turned into car dealerships! The packed parking lot in front of the Toyota building isn’t packed with shoppers; it’s packed with cars for sale! That’s actually a pretty clever reuse of vacant retail spaces with huge parking lots.

Here’s a rather poor image of the shopping center in 1968, when it was full of stores— including a Wigwam discount department store, one of the first companies to devise the discount-department-store concept.

But the more specific answer to what the Toyota dealership used to be is…a Safeway supermarket! Here’s the roof, which is a telltale sign of a former Safeway. Throughout the 1960s/1970s, Safeway built hundreds of barrel-vault-roof structures like this. Here and here are two others I’ve featured in this series. You can still find them all over the place, including, sometimes, still operating as Safeways.

And here’s a screenshot of the virtual tour on Google Maps, which shows that the ceiling has been remodeled but left intact:

This is what it would have looked like as a Safeway:

Here’s an auto-news article from 2006 describing the purchase and renovation of the Safeway. And here’s a blog post about the legacy of these vintage Safeways in the Seattle area. (And here, oddly enough, is another Toyota dealer I featured, which also swallowed up a pre-existing building!)

I’m not sure if any zoning changes were required for a car dealership to take over a retail space in a strip plaza, but certainly in some places there would be. There’s something ironic about a worn-out car-oriented shopping center being reborn as an actual place to sell cars. But it’s not a bad idea. You can eat or do a little shopping while your car is in the shop, whereas car dealers and service centers tend to sit on their own little islands along the highway.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a retail space reused this way. Have you?

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Related Reading:

Highway Archaeology

Drop Off Your Car for Coffee

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