Into the Great Big Open

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #193

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Giants walked among us:

You probably won’t be surprised that this was a supermarket. It is, however, quite a large one, especially for the year it was built. It’s an 80,000 square foot store, and it opened in 1963.

So what was it?

Here’s the top of a neat blog post that goes into its history:

As you can tell from the windows just to the right of the logo, which are still present today, this is the same building, with a minor facade update and, unfortunately, the removal of that cool arch.

This opened as a Giant Open Air Market, a Virginia supermarket chain that served, more or less, as the Wegmans (or other regional massive food emporium) of its day. It was based in Norfolk and had roughly two dozen supermarket locations. The one pictured and featured in the blog was the flagship store (Wikipedia cites a no-longer-available article and says the store was 150,000 square feet; it even had a second floor, which perhaps accounts for the discrepancy).

In any case, it is huge compared to the typical supermarket of the day, and it’s even quite large by today’s standards. It also featured all sorts of then-uncommon products and features. There was a “cheese cave” section, barbecue, pizza, and other prepared foods, and imported delicacies.

The Wikipedia article says:

As a 24-hour store (only closed on Christmas Day) the “front door” was an “air curtain” with no real doors. A blower pushed air down as customers entered and a steel grate below captured the air and recycled it. The grate was always full of loose coins that were cleaned out once a year and donated to charity. The location was also known for massive decorations, such as was a 20-foot fall “waterfall” of ice in the seafood department. The stores had large bakeries that produced fresh bakery 24 hours a day. Other accommodations for shoppers were a large portico to have their groceries loaded into their cars out of the rain, and a 24-hour laundromat.

Scroll through that blog post for photos. They’re wild, considering when this was, and not in a major city, either (though the military sites around the Hampton Roads area provided a stable middle-class customer base).

There are fun comments. For example, this: “It was magical to a little kid. The pizza is still the best that I have ever had. And you could go to the meat dept., pick out a steak, and then take it over to the restaurant and they would cook it for you over a fired grill.” And this: “I remember the merchandise being covered up and roped off at midnight on Saturday for the Sunday Blue Laws when you couldn’t purchase anything but food.”

A commenter on a Reddit thread about the store says, “That place was great! I remember the upstairs area and balcony. It was like Wegmans is today. Great BBQ too.”

Some interesting comments from a Facebook thread about the supermarket chain:

“I remember Giant before the sliding doors were used on a daily basis. It used to be no doors, just walk inside. Then came the natural gas shortage and then the doors were used.”

“Me and my mom having a steak at 1 in the morning back in 1972.”

“They catered my wedding.”

“I ordered my wedding cake from Giant.”

“On cold days they would serve heated Dr Pepper in a paper cup at the Wards Corner [the location of the flagship] store as soon as you came in.”

“Saw my first round pizza at 16; as my mom, Antonia Antinelli, always used a cookie sheet.”

This comment reveals that the store had a fairly large merchandise section, which was rare for supermarkets at the time. Depending on exactly how big it was, it might have even qualified as a sort of proto-supercenter:

The best store I’ve ever known. Watched the store grow as they diversified and brought a lot of new lines in, i.e.; hardware, clothing etc. Always had something new! Great selection and can’t forget the good food.”

Also: “My brother would get pizza, I would get a sub and parents would pick out their steak and cost a dollar or 2 to cook and serve with sides and rolls. Then my brother and I would check records out.”

They also apparently had a small video arcade. There are always tantalizing comments like this one: “I worked there. I also remember it before it was the real store. It was a market that was truly open air meaning it had no walls.”

As far as I can tell, it’s a little less interesting than that: what became Giant Open Air Markets first began as a produce stand in a market area. This Virginian-Pilot article from 1995 includes this history:

Whatever its difficulties in recent years, the neighborhood at the southern end of the Campostella bridge [in Norfolk] has had a rich retailing heritage. The late Wendell P. Rosso began selling fruit there in 1939 and broadened the business during the 1940s to meats and produce. His partnership with the late Vincent J. Mastracco Sr. eventually became Giant Open Air Markets, a predecessor of the Farm Fresh supermarket chain. The Rosso-Mastracco fruit and produce stand evolved into a grocery store with a restaurant and a bakery. By 1958, they had moved their store to a new building on the other side of Campostella Road.

Or this one: “A gallon of ice cream was $1. They also had exotic foods like chocolate covered ants. Had my first crab cake there. Segregated bathrooms. I snuck into the colored men’s room and was disappointed. It was the same. You can tell that I’m old as the hills.” This is probably accurate, sadly.

Other locations, like this surviving structure, were not as large; it’s about 40,000 square feet, including what may be a later addition. That would be more in line with a regular supermarket, though still above the average for the period.

Giant Open Air merged with another chain, Farm Fresh, in the 1980s and the name disappeared, as did, apparently, this bountiful, cutting-edge style of grocery retailing, at least until Wegmans got down here. If you’re on the East Coast in or north of North Carolina and you don’t have a Wegmans, you probably don’t have anything like this.

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It’s always a strange thing to read about something that sounds too grand or too modern to have existed so long ago. It’s sort of the same feeling as discovering that my little hometown used to have a genuine department store on Main Street. It’s like finding a fossil in a strata where it isn’t supposed to be, and realizing that your conception of history is all wrong. What happened? What happened to the world that made these things?

The answer is probably just boring and unsatisfying: just business. The energy crisis. The difficulty of sustaining such a multifaceted business. The shift in which locations were the most desirable, as new suburbs opened up further away from the old population centers.

The locations of Giant Open Air stores remind me a lot of the locations of old Kmarts. They opened in what were at the time prime, central locations, but which ended up being leapfrogged by newer, larger stores in newer suburbs over the decades. A new wave of stores was opening, basically, just as they were reaching the point where they looked and felt worse for wear.

Take a look at the aerial image of this Giant Open Air store in the year it opened, 1963. It’s the building in the middle at the left:

Here’s the same image today. Not too long after opening, the Interstate and a spaghetti-bowl interchange went in. Suddenly the grand supermarket was claustrophobically bounded by high-speed roadways, and must have been just a bit harder to pull into, both physically and psychologically.

Here’s the location of that surviving building I linked above. Same deal. You can see how these were prime spots that today don’t look as prime. It’s right in the middle of that triangle:

Beyond that, in some ways, this was a demonstration store, almost like the retail equivalent of a concept car. It must have taken an immense amount of work and expense to maintain. More than that, the sheer amount of labor. It was also at least somewhat skilled labor, to the extent that lots of people were doing in-store pizza baking, grilling, etc. (I bet insurance companies and fire marshals wouldn’t love open-flame grills inside supermarkets, too.) There’s something very modern but also old-fashioned about it all. Like one branch of modernity that we didn’t end up taking, that ended up dying out.

One of the really interesting things you realize reading about retail history is that before the modern supercenter emerged, and before Wegmans became the go-to massive supermarket in eight states, there were all sorts of very large stores loaded with features, amenities, large selections, and unusual products.

In fact, a lot of these stores were larger than their modern descendants-of-sorts. (Look up Schwegmann’s, no relation to Wegmans, another pioneering large-format supermarket.) Given how obscure a lot of them are now and how almost none survived to today, I’m not sure modern ones are “descended” from them at all. It’s almost like we invented this sort of retail concept twice, and the second time it stuck. I wrote about that here.

If you ran the 20th century again, who knows what the retail patterns would end up being. We’d probably always have invented supermarkets, because the idea of concentrating all the different categories of food (baker, butcher, grocer, etc.) along with some basic sort of food-adjacent merchandise (baking and kitchen equipment, home decor, drugs and vitamins) seems pretty obvious.

I don’t know that we’d have invented these “concept” emporiums, though. That took some particular planning, logistics, and imagination. Perhaps giants only roam once.

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Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #4

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

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #17

Why *Does* It Feel Like Things Are Always Getting Worse?

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