Grocery Archaeology

Original Tenant:  Grand Union Address: 22 W Main St, Denville, NJ Opened:  ca. 1960 Closed:  2001 Later Tenants:  Key Food Marketplace (2001-ca. 2005) > demolished > Walgreens Photographed:  July 2020 You win some, you lose some. This is an example of the latter. Grand Union built a roughly 20,000 square foot store here at 22 W Main St between 1957 and 1963 which lasted all the way to the end of the chain's life in 2001, then becoming very briefly a Key Food Marketplace for a few years. I assumed that Walgreens then took the spot of Key Food, opening sometime around 2008. Well that last part is true, but it turns out the Grand Union/Key Food building was actually demolished and replaced with a building roughly 5,000 square feet smaller (notice the walkway to the right of the Walgreens building; the Grand Union building immediately bordered the next row of storefronts). We can see that the diagonal parking rows here remain from Grand Union, but unfortunate...

Original Tenant: The Fresh Grocer Address: 100 Kirkpatrick St, New Brunswick, NJ (aka 95 Paterson St) Opened:  2012 Closed:  2014 Later Tenants:  Key Food (2015-2017) > SuperFresh (2017-2019) Photographed:  July 2020 Welcome to Wellness Plaza, a highly-touted development in the center of New Brunswick that can be described as, at best, a complex with no real effect in downtown, and at worst, a largely-abandoned, expensive eyesore that detracts from the thriving city. The complex opened in 2012 with an RWJ (Robert Wood Johnson, a division of RWJ Barnabas, a healthcare provider affiliated with Rutgers University, I believe) Fitness Center, a large parking garage, and a 50,000 square foot supermarket. It was a location of Philadelphia chain The Fresh Grocer, which is located in several similar developments in and around Philadelphia. Almost immediately after this store opened, The Fresh Grocer's owners left the small and relatively weak cooperative Great Valu Marke...