Safeway at Claremont and College in Oakland to close on Monday

Steven E.F. Brown

The Safeway store at College and Claremont in Oakland will close July 8.

The Safeway store at College and Claremont avenues in Oakland will close Monday as workers prepare to knock it down later this summer.

Safeway (NYSE: SWY) plans a bigger store on the triangular site where Claremont and College come together. It hopes to have the new, 45,500-square-foot store open on the site next summer.

Removing an empty 76 gas station in the point of the triangle is also part of the plan.

Residents fought against the planned changes, and in the end Safeway shrank the proposed size of the new store from 51,500 square feet. It also made concessions about parking issues to concerned neighbors. The existing store touches the Oakland-Berkeley border, which complicated issues.

One sign of how slowly things moved is that a Shell gas station across the intersection of College and Claremont, in the opposite triangular lot from the still-standing 76 station, was closed and quickly razed and is now an empty lot. The 76 station continued to stand vacant all that time, with posters on its fences urging residents to support Safeway's plans.

Changes are also coming to the Safeway at Broadway and Pleasant Valley -- the entire shopping center will be demolished and rebuilt.

News reports sometimes confuse the two projects, calling one or both of them "Rockridge Safeway."

Steven E.F. Brown is web editor at the San Francisco Business Times.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bizj_eastbay/~3/mEEgaWeqlkQ/safeway-at-claremont-and-college-in.html

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