AS I MENTIONED HERE a few weeks back, I’m now doing a little thing in the back of a certain self-styled “sleazy tabloid,” out by the real-estate ads.

It’s a little guide to some remaining old buildings, and the stories they have to tell.

Here are a few more examples.

Originally, chain grocery stores were just little neighborhood mom-and-pop stores, only owned by corporations instead of by moms and pops. The biggest chain in the pre-supermarket era, A&P, had 14,000 outlets in 32 states at its peak. Safeway, the west’s first dominant chain, started in Idaho and started building and buying stores in Seattle in 1923. One of these first-generation stores still exists as a grocery, the independent Hillcrest Deli-Market on East Olive. It added a new front end in the ’80s and now sells a lot of product lines the old stores never had (hot deli items, frozen foods), but the basic layout remains.

The central building of the complex now known as Starbucks Center was originally built in 1907 as a Sears catalog warehouse, delivering most everything a household might need (even houses, in the form of plans and parts). In 1925, Sears took a hesitant step beyond mail-order by setting up retail stores in its Chicago and Seattle warehouses. Today, the chain’s oldest remaining store is still on 1st Avenue South, though the phase-out of Sears’ catalogs caused the rest of the sprawling complex to be refitted for offices and other retailers. (It’s got more square footage than the Columbia (now Bank of America) Tower.)

The first generation of self-service food supermarkets came along in the 1930s, as a Depression-era cost-cutting gimmick. They typically ran about 5,000 square feet, less than 10 percent the size of most new ones built today. But many of these tall, solid cement-box structures have found continued uses, even as the food chains moved to ever-bigger, ever-further-apart sites. Tower Books (1st North and Mercer) and Seattle Paint Supply (80th and Aurora) don’t just bear the ghosts of Wheaties boxes past. They’re stoic, relatively human-scale buildings with plenty of life past their original “pull dates.”

In the early ’60s, Albertsons built a modern supermarket at 23rd and Madison. Just a few years later, company brass got nervous about being in an “inner city” (read: minority) area, but was equally nervous about the potential bad PR if it closed the store. So instead, it created an opportunity for good PR by turning the branch over to a nonprofit community group. The resulting venture, Co-Op Foods, didn’t survive long. The space now houses a Planned Parenthood office/clinic. Its rapidly-upscaling neighborhood is serviced by four supermarkets, including a huge new Safeway and the new Madison Market health-food co-op, all on or near 15th Avenue.

Regional discount-store chains thrived briefly in the ’50s and ’60s, before K mart and later Wal-Mart cornered that market. Here, there was Valu-Mart (later known as Leslees), owned by the Weisfield’s jewelry chain. The Greenwood Valu-Mart survives as a Fred Meyer, but a more interesting fate befell the Everett branch. It was bought up by John Fluke, a leading manufacturer of electronic test equipment; resulting in perhaps the only abandoned shopping center to be turned into a factory. (Too bad Fluke didn’t call it “Ye Olde Mall.”)

IN OTHER NEWS: Times TV listing for Monday: “9:00 Later Today: Style, menopause.” Taking menopause in style–now that’s the attitude I like. Maybe one could throw a posh “last-period party,” highlighted by the ceremonial flushing of the last flushable applicator.

TOMORROW: So there are a lot of female public artists. So what?

ELSEWHERE:

• I keep tellin’ ya, America’s worst “humor” column is formulaic tripe, and here’s proof….
• “Future goals: To find the love of my life and marry him; to become famous so as to get revenge on those who have hurt me… to have a family.”