Photo by justindc.

Don’t forget, Shaw residents: today is your last chance to pick up groceries at the Giant supermarket at 1414 8th Street NW. The grocery store will be closing its doors today at 6 p.m.

The O Street Giant has earned a bum reputation over the past decade or so. But as we await a new, huge Giant that’s to open on the site in 2013, it’s probably worth remembering that the O Street store wasn’t always the slow-moving, rodent-infested supermarket many of us currently perceive it to be. Jenny Rogers digs into the history:

But in its 32-year history, the O Street Giant, as it was often called, wasn’t always regarded with sneers or dotted with mice droppings. When it opened on Oct. 10, 1979, the store was declared a triumph for a neighborhood still recovering from riots and struggling with crime. The Washington Post printed that it “symbolizes the transformation that has occurred in Shaw, once the city’s worst slum.” Then-mayor Marion Barry cut a white satin ribbon and proclaimed, “It’s the good times for Shaw.”

According to reports at the time, the O Street Giant was the first new grocery store to open in the District in 10 years. Post writer LaBarbara Bowman noted its “gourmet foods”—including caviar, pickled mushrooms, and Swedish pancake mix—and “gourmet produce”—pomegranates and papayas. For less discerning shoppers, the store offered “pork and beef neckbone, large galvanized trash cans and large packages of rice and beans.” These diverse offerings, it was predicted, would serve both Shaw’s poor and its newly returning middle-class residents.

Here’s hoping the new store can rekindle those feelings.

Also worth noting: the grocer has also made a change to the shuttle its offering to residents affected by the closing. The free shuttle, which will give shoppers a ride to the Tivoli Giant in Columbia Heights, will now pick up and drop off at both 1330 7th Street NW and in front of Asbury Dwellings at 7th Street and Rhode Island Avenue NW. The two stops replace the previous stop in front of the Gibson Plaza Apartments at 1301 7th Street NW. The schedule remains unchanged:

>> Sundays: pick up at noon; leave Tivoli at 2 p.m.
>> Tuesdays: pick up at 9:30 a.m.; leave Tivoli at 11:30 a.m.
>> Thursdays: pick up at 9:30 a.m.; leave Tivoli at 11:30 a.m.