Just when I thought I had them all... along comes another postcard I haven't seen before. Luckily, I snatched it up (Buy It Now!). This beauty is of Sunvalley Mall in Concord in its early days. You'd never know the mall was two stories from this shot; the lower level is underground (least on this side of the mall).
If you look closely, you can see "Cinema" on the side, by Bank of America. Also, Macy's appears to have the same awnings they did thirty years ago! Well, same color and style, at least.
The back of the postcard reads "SunValley, the world's largest enclosed, air conditioned shopping center, contains free parking for 9,000 cars, including 16 acres of covered parking."
I *had* to cut and enlarge the shopping cart sitting in front of the blue car in the foreground. Where did that come from? Did Penney's have carts at one time?
Scott
6 comments:
That cart's probably from a five and dime, drug store or supermarket at the mall. Penney wouldn't have had carts back then.
Just to the north of Penneys in a building separate from the mall was a discount/grocery store called BAZAR. I assume it was a chain, though I never saw any others. There's another old SunValley postcard out there clearly showing a BAZAR cart(being pushed inside the mall...odd)
Now, Walgreens may have had shopping carts, but they were way down at the other end by Sears. BAZAR makes more sense given the location of the photo.
The BAZAR building had a variety of owners and formats before finally settling into Mervyn's and Longs about 20 plus years ago. Prior to BAZAR(and SunValley),it was Lee's Value World (owned by the Lee Bros. grocery chain) One format I remember after BAZAR was Rhodesway, a discount chain affiliated with Rhodes dept store.
Remember, this was before KMart, Target, and WalMart solidified the genre, and discount chains came and went quite frequently. Just down the street from SunValley you had White Front, which became The Treasury(JC Penney owned), which became GEMCO, and is now Target.
I am 100% certain that the cart is from the neighboring discount department store and supermarket. The only question that remains is that if this photo/postcard was made when Lee Bros. Value World was operating at the (neighboring) site (1964-October 1967). If this photo is from after November 1967 the cart would belong to Bazar. :)
Bazar was definitely a chain headquartered in the Pacific Northwest, and they had stores throughout the Bay Area.
Honestly, it would not surprise if it was from JCPenney. After all, if JCPenney had AUTO SERVICE (at one time), why COULDN'T it have carts?
There was a Wallgreens near Sears that used to have shopping carts. Today the space is taken up by Johnny Rockets, Subway, and one or two other stores.
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