Freshman on The Hill

Photo by María Helena Carey

Moving to DC from the West Coast, I found it a nice surprise to know that there was a Safeway supermarket in our neighborhood. After all, Safeway, I reasoned, is a West Coast kind of thing, right? It would be just like grocery shopping back home, in a store with familiar brands and labels and happy red-on-white S logos bidding me hello.

On our first walk down to the Safeway on 14th, Kentucky and D, however, my stomach did a kind of weird flip. Why was there a police car parked near the entrance? Why did it look so… scary? Inside, the messages were mixed: the lovely new wood floors juxtaposed to gaps in the shelves; the Starbucks at the entrance looking vacant and a little disheveled; the high number of people standing side by side, buying gourmet fresh herbs and anything organic they could get their hands on, next to people paying their tab by EBT

Safeway and DC have a long, rich history together. One of the more charming DC things I’ve come across since moving here is the Naming of the Safeways. There is Social Safeway in Georgetown and Soviet Safeway near Dupont Circle, though there are some who would claim that all DC locations have been “Soviet” and deprived at some point or another; and there is Sixties Safeway and Secret Safeway, and the Fenty-named Sexy Safeway. If you would like to know what your nearest Safeway store is called, you can click here to find out.  Alternately, you can also go to a recent discussion over at the Prince of Petworth on Safeway nicknames, or you can read Ursula Gross’s amusing piece on Safeway Identities over at NFT.

When I talked to Mary Donovan –a 30-year Hill resident– a few weeks ago, she mentioned that Safeway was, in fact, the one chain of grocery stores that stayed on in the Southeast part of DC through the bleak post-riot pre-Urban Renaissance/gentrification years. Because of that, she is loyal to Safeway despite the influx of shiny new grocery stores that have cropped up over the past years.

She said that, back in the day, her out-of-town relatives dubbed it the UnSafeway (right in tune with the urban naming tradition) on account of the police officers assigned to the store on a permanent basis and the frequent bouts of gunfire that afflicted the parking lot. For many, many years, it was common knowledge that you could walk away from that particular Safeway with more than just groceries, if you know what I mean. Nowadays, the biggest offender in the UnSafeway has to be the hordes of families wearing Crocs or Uggs or the ugly comfortwear du jour. It’s true that Capitol Hill has its areas of crime, but the reputation that earned the UnSafeway its nickname is, thankfully, a thing of the (recent) past.

Perhaps it’s time to rename ours the Soccer Mom Safeway? Or maybe the Social Experiment Safeway?