WASHINGTON — Since it opened in 1981, many residents of the Tenleytown area in Northwest Washington have relied on the local Safeway supermarket for all of their grocery needs. In less than a year, however, Safeway customers will be forced to look elsewhere as the store will be closing its doors.
Georgetown Day School (GDS), a Pre-K-12 preparatory school across the street from Safeway’s parking lot, purchased the store and the land around it for about $40 million earlier this month. The purchase is part of a major expansion plan for GDS, which hopes to use the land to finally unite its three campuses.
While the sale might be good news for members of the GDS community, it has come as a shock to many Safeway customers who expected the store to be renovated in the near future.
Over the last several years, Safeway has been modernizing stores throughout the country and the company expected to do the same with the Tenleytown store, which is one of the oldest Safeways in the region.
Safeway Government Affairs and Public Relations Manager Craig Muckle said the store had, in fact, planned to renovate the Tenleytown store before GDS made its offer.
“Our primary goal was to redevelop the store,” Muckle said. “We had reached out to the community as far back as 2008, 2009 to make our plans known that we were interested in redeveloping the store—creating a new building from scratch.”
In an area where grocery stores are constantly being modernized and renovated to include larger aisles and state-of-the-art technology, the Tenleytown Safeway has grown old and outdated. Upon walking in, customers are greeted by the familiar array of fruits and flowers that adorn the entrance of most grocery stores. But after venturing deeper into the store, its old age quickly becomes apparent and the differences between the store and the more modern, wide-aisled supermarkets in the region become clearer than ever.
The aisles of the store are narrow, and the old, antique-like floor is nothing compared to the fading, rusting ceiling above. The store also features bulky cash registers and lacks the self-checkout options that have become standard at most grocery stores in the region. The Tenleytown Safeway, in Washington since Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, was in desperate need of change. And despite previous plans to rebuild the store, selling it to GDS offered Safeway a more immediate solution and a more feasible method for modernizing the community.
“The important takeaway is that our ultimate purpose was to renovate the store and help modernize the community,” Muckle said. “We consider Georgetown Day our close neighbors. We knew they had some needs of their own and they knew we were interested in redevelopment in the community.”
Although the sale might be helpful for the community and for GDS, the news that their grocery store will be closing comes as a shock and disappointment to many loyal customers in the neighborhood.
“I’ll miss it. I come here a lot,” Nora Green said. “I’m between the one at Chevy Chase and this one, but when I make big buys, I usually come [to Tenleytown].”
For many customers, the location of the store is convenient because of its proximity to residential areas and the city. Safeway shopper Joe Cohoon said he will miss the location for its peaceful, tree-lined parking lot and the lack of traffic in the area, a valuable commodity in a city like D.C.
While many customers will miss the store after it closes, some said closing it is the best solution since a renovation was unlikely to happen in the immediate future. “It’s awful,” shopper Christa Linder said.
Another local shopper, who wished to remain anonymous, said the store was badly managed and that renovating it would have been too costly. But Safeway customer Antonio Lamprea said it will not affect him because he can just start shopping at Georgetown. Other grocery stores in Tenleytown include a Whole Foods and a Giant, which is under renovation. The Safeway will remain open on lease for at least 10 more months.
For GDS, purchasing the store will allow the school to create a campus large enough to accommodate all 1,070 students — a goal they have been trying to accomplish ever since they opened the school to high-schoolers. Alison Grasheim, director of communications at GDS, said the school’s expansion will greatly improve the student and parent experience at the school and will have a positive impact on the community.
“Everyone [at GDS] is excited,” Grasheim said. “Right now, we have families with kids at both campuses, we have teachers and coaches who work at both campuses and the administrative team is constantly going back and forth. So, in that sense, it’s exciting. It’s going to be a huge help to our financial bottom line, and also the community.”
While the sale will be beneficial to most in the community, others will have to find a new location to go grocery shopping. But despite the store’s deteriorating condition and seemingly unavoidable closing, it has been a key part of the Tenleytown community for thirty years and likely will not be forgotten any time soon.
“Any grocery store is a valued commodity,” Muckle said. “I think, in an urban environment especially, people typically want be close to vital services and people usually consider grocery stores to be vital services. We think we’ve been an integral part of the community and have been valued.”
Contributors: Xandie Kuenning, Christiane Crawford, Claudette Soler, Lauren Ramaley, William Peters, Jake Baskin and Valerie Akinyoyenu.
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