Groceteria.com

St. Louis is about 250 miles from KC. Safeway had stores in Columbia (about halfway) in the mid-80s. There isn't much between Columbia & St. Louis and until fairly recently most chains stuck to a radius of 100-150 miles from their distribution centers. Memphis & Little Rock are even further ...

Biggar was Stouffer's son-in-law, not nephew His grandfather was John D. Rockefeller's physician.

More trivia--Vernon Stouffer led a syndicate that owned the Cleveland Indians in the 60s--they kept the franchise in Cleveland, but did little to attract & retain better players.

The Northwood, Ohio store was a Woolco, although they also had a large store (with Harvest House restaurant) nearby in Woodville Mall.

Stoiuffer got out of the restaurant business in phases during the late 70s/early 80s. First they closed the restaurants with the Stouffer name. Then they closed the boutique chains that had been established in the 70s, like the Cheese Cellar. The restaurants started out as lunch counters and then we...

The big New York area chains often had stores in NJ and some had their warehouses and HQs there: A&P and Grand Union, for example. Shop-Rite also has had a NJ base. It's probably easier to source many of the northern NY sububs from NJ than from Long Island. First National operated there after th...

FWIW, the "newest" car in the lot appears to be a '58 Chevy

You seem to be talking about historic preservation (doument and preserve architecture) rather than the sort of things that historical societies do (make histories, preserve artifacts & documents). The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has local chapters is a good place to start and...

My recollection is that they went into Chapter 11 several years ago. By then, all they had were the Indy stores and I thought those were ultimately liquidated. I was surpised to see that they still had a handful of stores when I was in Indy a couple weeks ago--perhaps, some store managers found inve...

I seem to recall that the supermarkets were leased departments run by Kantor Bros, which was acquired in the late 60s by Fisher Foods of Cleveland, operator of the Fazio's chain in NE Ohio. What happened to the Rink's super market after Gray Drug sold the stores around 1980, I think)? Cook United ra...

Cafeterias used to be common in other places: New York City and in smaller cities in the Midwest--places like Indianapolis and its satellite cities come to mind. In New York, you could find them in places like the Upper West Side, back in the 60s---I remmebre from visiting a sa little kid. By the ti...

Kann's was part of that now gone species of stores that were simply low end department stores. They usually carried a full line of merchandise, but at the low end--although some didn't have furniture or appliances. Bailey's in Cleveland, Tiedtke's in Toldeo, the Fifth Street Store in LA, and Goldbla...

The mall in Pasadena got off to a good start, but then there was a grizzly murder in the parking garage and nothing was the same after that. Malls seem very prone to decline once crime makes it into the media. For years, malls had plenty of crime--even violent crime, but the operators kept it out of...

There's also a Smart & Final a little further West. This area isn't far from the Arcadia Pavillions or the Ralphs in Arcadia's old secondary downtown mon Las Tunas. As supermarkets have gotten bigger, the number of stores keeps declining and some areas go unserved or get secondary types of super...

Kann's department store, the low-end DC-based chain was to anchor the mall and it went out of business just as the mall was to open. There probably wasn't an viable tenant for that space---higher end stores wanted "real malls" and it wouldn't have fit a K-Mart. I seem to recall that there ...

Western Hills opened in the 50s, and was almost next door to Western Woods. I believe that McAlpin's was an anchor. There porbably was a second anchor. The center had an Albers. You're also missing the Kenwoods, which predate Beechmont. Kenwood Plaza, I believe, had a McAlpin's. Kenwood Mall had Shi...