Unlike last week’s mystery photo of a Red Food Store in East Lake – more about that below – the shopping complex pictured here should be easy to identify for long-time Chattanooga residents.
This January 1965 photo shows the Zayre department store and Red Food Store shopping center in Golden Gateway, part of a sprawling mid-century “urban renewal” project west of downtown. Golden Gateway offered a suburban-style shopping center with ample free parking just blocks from the center of downtown Chattanooga.
The photo is part of a collection of EPB images at ChattanoogaHistory.com, a website dedicated to preserving vintage photos of the city and curated by Sam Hall, a local history enthusiast.
Opened in October of 1964, the Golden Gateway complex included the 125,000-square-foot Zayre departent store and the largest of the 15 Red Food Stores then in the region, according to newspaper archives. The shopping center was on the north side of West Ninth Street (now M.L. King Boulevard) west of Highway 27.
Zayre was a Framingham, Massachusetts-based chain of discount stores that originated in 1956. At the time of the opening of this Chattanooga Zayre store, it was said to be the largest in the chain, which operated until 1990. From its first store in 1956, the Zayre chain had grown to 56 stores in 18 states by the time the Golden Gateway location opened here. By 1964, the company was also reporting $150 million a year in revenues.