Martin Austermuhle
Giant Food and joint-venture developers CHR LLC announced yesterday that a long-awaited 63,000 square-foot Giant supermarket/pharmacy will open in the Camp Simms area of Southeast (near Alabama Avenue and 15th Street SE) in spring 2006. The supermarket, whose planned construction in Ward 8 dates back at least five years, will stand alongside 25 acres worth of commercial development, worth some $37.5 million, in an area notoriously short on retail options.
Attracting Giant, to Ward 8 is part of D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’ larger effort to center re-development of blighted communities around big-box stores. Williams noted in his recent State of the District address that a Costco was coming to Fort Lincoln and DCist has told you about plans for a Target in Columbia Heights and a Harris Teeter on the fringes of Capitol Hill near the Potomac Avenue metrorail station. Big-box stores are also slated to become part of the development plans for the Anacostia River waterfront and the area surrounding the baseball stadium-to-be.
The most important question facing the new Giant is what Ward 8 residents will take to calling it. As DCist has noted in the past, District residents have a tendency to express their endearment to or frustration with their local shopping locales by offering them nicknames — there is the 17th Street NW Soviet Safeway, 20th Street NW “Secret” Townhouse Safeway, the infamous Social Safeway on Wisconsin Avenue NW, a Senior Safeway in the Watergate complex, the Spanish Safeway in Adams Morgan, the Soviet Giant in McLean Gardens/Cathedral Heights, and others.
>> DCist on grocery politics.
>> Euphemistic Safeway Map from vilimpoc.org
