P2J2 Shadle Associates LLC, which owns Shadle Center here, expects to move forward in coming months with further improvements at the North Side shopping center, including construction of a new Safeway Stores Inc. supermarket and work at the former Lamonts Apparel Inc. store there.


Paul Pazooki, a Seattle businessman and part owner of P2J2 Shadle Associates, says the company plans to raze a significant amount of retail space in January at the west end of the center to make way for construction of a 55,000-square-foot Safeway store there.


Work on the new store is expected to start in February, and Mitch Johnson, a Bellevue, Wash.-based real estate manager for Safeway, says the grocer hopes to be open there by the end of 2001.


The new supermarket is expected to be built just south of an older, smaller Safeway store near the southwest corner of Wellesley and Alberta. The building that houses the older store will be demolished after the supermarket moves to its new location, Johnson says.


The new Safeway would be built where a Rite Aid Corp. store currently sits and also would take up the land where a former Chuck E. Cheese Pizza restaurant and several smaller retail spaces are located.


Those structures would be torn down.


Pazooki says most of the space to be demolished currently is vacant. Rite Aids lease there expires in January. Pazooki says he doesnt know yet whether Rite Aid will move its outlet to another locationeither in Shadle Center or elsewhereor close it. A Rite Aid representative couldnt be reached for comment.


The new Safeway store will be just west of a 120,000-square-foot Wal-Mart store that opened earlier this year.


At the other end of the retail center, renovation work is expected to start in the former Lamonts building in two or three months, though details about what that work will include still are cloudy. Pazooki says a prospective tenant is interested in either all or part of the 52,000-square-foot retail space that Lamonts formerly occupied. He declines, however, to disclose the name of the prospective tenant until a lease is signed, and he says that company hasnt decided whether it would want to remodel the space or tear it down and build a new structure there.


Construction costs for the new Safeway store havent been firmed up yet, Pazooki says.