Finally, after decades of failed attempts and almost-but-not-quites, there will be a real supermarket in downtown Seattle.

It’ll be an IGA franchise in the lower level of the old Kress variety store at Third and Pike. Vanishing Seattle readers have seen a lovely pic of the soda fountain counter that had been there.

There are now more than 18,000 residents in greater downtown, including more than 10,000 in Belltown/Denny Regrade. But we’ve had to either attain sustenance at convenience stores, deli-marts, the individual small merchants of the Pike Place Market, or out of the neighborhood (lower Queen Anne, Broadway, the International District, or now the Whole Foods at Denny and Westlake).

I love Pike Place, but it ain’t exactly one-stop shopping, and it’s bigger on produce and meat than on packaged goods.

Whole Foods is OK if you shop around for bargains, but it’s not quite an everyday supplier of staples for us non-zillionaires.

Metropolitan Market, Uwajimaya, the Tribeca Building Safeway, and the Uptown QFC aren’t really our ‘hood; going there’s a deliberate shopping adventure, not a quick supply run.

Then there’s the online-ordering-and-delivery solution, available via Safeway, Albertsons, and promised soon from Amazon. That also has its downside–you’ve gotta order a lot to avoid a delivery charge, and you’ve gotta be home during the multi-hour “delivery window.”

So this is a great step forward for those of us who live downtown (and for the 160,000 or so who work or visit downtown each weekday).

The store is set to open in February. I can hardly wait.

One mistake in the P-I story about this: There never was a QFC at “811 Pike Street.” That was a misprint in the Polk City Directory; a QFC was, and is, at 811 East Pike Street.

There were smallish A&P (on Second near James) and Tradewell (at the current Fourth & Pike Rite Aid site) stores in past decades. And there was the Security Public Market in the current Bed Bath & Beyond space at Third and Virginia; like Pike Place, that was a sort of grocery mall in which each department was individually owned and operated.