The Hi-Ho Shopping Center — River Road and Meridian, Puyallup
Sears at one end, Elvins at the other, and a drug store, a laundry and a filling station in between. Twenty-five acres of it on River Road.
The Hi-Ho Shopping Center sat where North Meridian meets River Road in Puyallup, and for a stretch of years it was simply where you went. Fourteen retailers and a bank. Groceries, prescriptions, clothing, gardening supplies, flowers and petrol. In 1965 the whole site grossed over nine million dollars.
What dates the Hi-Ho most precisely is the naming. The shops inside it were the Hi-Ho Food Center, the Hi-Ho Launder Center and the Hi-Ho Shoe Center — the name running down the front of the building, repeated, one storefront after the next.
In February 1965 a Tacoma Transit bus was carrying an advert for it. The photograph of Bus #303 survives, and the advert reads: “on River Road in Puyallup, just 10 minutes away from Tacoma.” Ten minutes was the pitch. That is how far away Tacoma felt.
Fred Meyer acquired it in 1980 and traded it as Fred Meyer’s Hi-Ho, which is how many people remember the name at all. The Hi-Ho name was retired around 1999.
Where to actually see it
The Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room holds at least five dated photographs, and they are very nearly the only record of what the place looked like:
- an aerial dated 9 March 1963 — the earliest hard proof we have found that the centre existed
- a street view, 8 July 1966
- a second frame from the same day showing the Elvins end
- the bus advert, 18 February 1965
- an interior from 20 January 1967, with a Green Giant display
What we do not know
Two things, and we would rather say so than guess at them.
We have no reliable opening date. The year 1962 gets repeated online, but the only date we can actually stand behind is that aerial from March 1963. And nobody seems to know who Elvins was. The department store anchored one end of the centre for years, and we cannot find a founder, an origin or a closing date for it anywhere.
If you worked at the Hi-Ho, or you remember what the sign looked like, we would like to hear from you — particularly about the sign, because no written description of it exists.
We print South Sound designs in Milton, a few minutes up the road. The Puyallup collection is where ours live.