Pope St. building will return to roots - Silvercity Daily Press (2024)

Posted on August 31, 2024

Written by on August 31, 2024

By The Daily Press Staff
A social media post this week asked about the history of the building on Pope Street at College Avenue that was the longtime location of Life Quest — and is the soon-to-be home of the Silver City Food Co-op. As it turns out, after renovation is complete, the building will return to its roots as a grocery store.
The building, virtually unchanged on its exterior, was built in 1940 as the new home of Silver City’s Safeway store, and opened for business on Friday, Nov. 15, 1940. A full-page ad in the Nov. 14 edition of the Daily Press announced a six-day “grand opening event” for the new store, which included the latest in food store amenities, like “large parking lots, large new produce department and fixtures, most modern meat fixtures, large, spacious aisles, department markers, larger variety of national brand foods, lowest prices, new daylight non-glare lighting, tile floor, etc.”
Notably — probably because of the large number of locally owned grocers who were also advertisers — the newspaper didn’t organize a congratulatory issue with descriptive article, which generally accompanied new business openings of the era.
The grand opening celebration was marred slightly by crime, however, according to the Monday edition of the newspaper.
“Safeway’s new store, College Ave. and Pope St., was entered by burglars sometime after midnight Saturday by forcing the lock of the front door,” the front-page story read. “Attempt was made to carry away the safe, which contained the day’s receipts. However, weighing about 1,200 pounds, the safe proved too heavy to move, even tho a small store hand-truck was pressed into service.”
The crime was discovered Sunday morning by store manager S.M. Phifer when he arrived to open for the day, and he notified Grant County Sheriff George S. Murray and City Marshal Ben Deck. According to the article, investigating police officers decided the attempted robbery was “the work of amateurs.”
“Survey of the store revealed that nothing was taken, the stock being undisturbed, and cash registers containing considerable change had not been touched,” the article concluded. “Apparently the burglars were bent on making a big cash haul of week-end receipts.”
After Silver City’s Safeway store relocated three blocks up Pope Street 25 years later, the building became the longtime home of Surplus City, followed by a stint as a Farmer’s Market store before becoming the headquarters of Southwest N.M. Services to the Handicapped, better known by its acronym SWSH. The nonprofit organization rebranded as Life Quest before closing its doors in 2018, selling the building to the Silver City Food Co-op the same year.