LEE’S FOOD MARKET An Unlikely Story of Longevity
david murray
The ongoing life of Lee’s Food Market is an unlikely story. A simple 1948 one-storey building was the origin of this family business – a corner store in the post-war Edmonton neighbourhood of Strathearn. * After WWII, during the Alberta economic boom, every new neighbourhood in Edmonton was given a commercial core, a slight expansion of the ubiquitous corner store. A permit to build was approved on June 16, 1948 for a one-storey wood-frame building that would accommodate a meat market and a grocery. The first business, the ShopRite Food Market, occupied one half of the building; the other half was Hart’s Drug Store. By 1951 the store was owned by James Lee and known as Lee’s Food Market. James was joined by his brother, Tom, who had come to Canada in 1925 to work as a chef on the railway. James, who lived behind the market from 1951-3, and Tom ran the store for a few years until James returned to Hong Kong, selling the store to Tom in 1954. Tom Lee, now operating the business on his own, decided that he needed help with running the store and in 1954 he summoned his grandson Stanley from Hong Kong to join him in Edmonton. Stanley had escaped the Chinese revolution when his grandmother, See Pui Lee and Tom’s wife, took him to Hong Kong in the late 1940s. Stanley, 16 years old, arrived in Edmonton to assist his grandfather and to finish high school education at Victoria School. In 1956, just two years after arriving, Stanley was so immersed in Edmonton culture that he purchased season’s tickets to Edmonton’s Canadian Football League team, the Edmonton Eskimos. In 1958, Tom Lee bought the adjacent vacant lot to the west and built a one storey infill building with a family apartment in the back. The front of the building was leased as a neighbourhood commercial space. Stanley, now 19, returned to Hong Kong to be married, then came back to Edmonton with his new wife Donna, and two children followed – Tony in 1959 and Cindy in 1961. They lived at the back of the new one-storey infill, Donna tended the store and Stanley ventured into local business - insurance, real estate and development. A momentous decision was made in 1965 when Tom and Stanley hired prominent local architects, Sinclair Skakun Naito, to design a second floor on the 1959 building, and to completely re-design and unify the exterior of these two buildings. This is when Lee’s Food Market expanded into the entire floor space of the original 1948 one-storey building. It was a stylish modern International Style transformation that has now endured seven decades of civic growth as Lee’s Food Market and continues as a popular neighbourhood destination in 2023. *
Edmonton Archives
1957 aerial photo of the Strathearn community, Edmonton, Alberta
The very young, very new firm of Skakun & Naito, 1958 before Sinclair joined them. image suppied by Nadine Harder, Casey Skakun’s daughter
Lee Family archives, supplied by Cindy Lee
The newly transformed building shortly after it was completed in 1966. This photograph was taken during Edmonton’s annual Klondike Days festival celebrating the 1890s gold rush and Edmonton’s participation in it.
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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