Grant Street Grocery, Casper Wyoming
Grant Street Grocery in Casper Wyoming is the only surviving small neighborhood grocery store in the town and even advertises the same.
Opened in 1921, the store was converted into a specialty grocery store and deli some years ago, and features meats and cheeses, as well as many other items, that are unlikely to appear on the counters of regular grocery stores. It's featured here for its simple sign, as well as being a remnant of something that was once very common, a neighborhood store.
I've mentioned this once before, but even during my lifetime a trend away from residential grocery stores, which was already really pronounced when I was a kid, has really developed.
When I was a boy, there was a grocery store that we could walk to and occasionally did for gum and the like on Ash Street. Downtown there were two more, one on Center and another in North Casper one more on the Sandbar. There was yet another on Elk Street. Finally, there was one downtown on Yellowstone Street.
Today, all of these are gone and only Grant Street remains. The Sandbar store was the last to close and it morphed into a butcher shop alone, under the same name, that still exists. Meat was always their strong point. Grant Street itself closed for a time and was remodeled as a specialty grocer, as noted above. Prior to that brief closure, it hung on by delivering groceries, being perhaps a bit ahead of its time in some ways in regard to that.
The store on Ash is a t-shirt shop now. I don't know what the Elk Street store is. The one downtown, the old Bluebird, is a restaurant. One of the old groceries is a private residence, which I think is what it was even at the time it was open, its owners operating it the really old fashioned way and living on the premises. When they retired, they kept on living there, I think.
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