Grocery Archaeology

    Up next we're headed into Connecticut! This is the beginning of my fairly extensive New England coverage, but my coverage here in Connecticut is a little limited. So we're going to see basically the whole state to the west of Hartford, where I have 22 stores which will take us about a month to see. You can get an idea of our stops from the (fairly crude, I know) map I made for this section. The counties are marked in the light blue, the larger cities in dark blue, and other places we're stopping in white. We'll start in Greenwich, then jump over to Bridgeport before turning north for stops in Newtown (roughly 2/3 of the way between Bridgeport and New Fairfield), New Fairfield, and Sherman, then east to Northville, Washington, Bethlehem, Watertown, and Waterbury. Then, in the greater Hartford area, we'll see Southington, Plainville, New Britain, Newington, and West Hartford, and then New Hartford to the north. There's some really interesting stores here -- so

Original Grocery Tenant: Gristedes Address: 325 NY-100, Somers, NY Opened:  1974 Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  CVS Photographed:  July 9, 2021 Sometimes my gut feeling leads me astray in deciding what used to be a supermarket, but this 15,000 square foot CVS just felt like a former supermarket to me. A little research shows I was right: the space was built with the rest of the strip mall in 1974 as a Gristedes. The infamously expensive New York City chain has branched out from the city on a few occasions, with their largest expansion being up to Westchester County. We've seen their former stores in Pelham and Scarsdale , too. I don't know when Gristedes closed, but it was well before the 2019 opening of a new upscale supermarket just across the street. Check it out here !