Grocery Archaeology

    Up next -- we head to Charleston! And a few other towns around it in South Carolina. We begin to the northwest of the city in Summerville, then we wander through West Ashley and other northern parts of Charleston (note: not North Charleston, a separate city), before heading straight into downtown. We'll make one stop east of Charleston in Mount Pleasant, then travel out to Folly Beach on the coast outside of Charleston. Folly Beach is on Folly Island, one of the many islands off the coast of South Carolina, and we'll be exploring several of them. After Folly Island, we'll stop by Johns Island, Kiawah Island, and finally Wadmalaw Island. That's going to take us about a month, so sit back and enjoy! This is an interesting area, and it's also one I visited recently (January 2022, as a matter of fact) so it's pretty fresh in my memory. Hopefully, that makes for more exciting blog posts. As always, thanks for reading and following me all around the area and I'

Original Tenant: unknown Address: 712 High St, Portsmouth, VA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  unknown Photographed:  January 2020 We're here in downtown Portsmouth, the next town south of Norfolk which has an interesting downtown. It seems that it's a more historically preserved city than Norfolk, which has a lot of new and middle-aged development, and also a lower-income city although it looks like there's some redevelopment going on downtown with some new businesses and interesting attractions downtown. This little storefront has the feel of an old grocery store, and it definitely sold food at one point but it may have been more of a newsstand/convenience store -- or even an ice cream parlor, possibly -- based on what's left on the storefront here. I thought it was worth photographing anyway. (Like our Monticello Ave store, this one does not appear on Groceteria's list , but that doesn't mean it wasn't a grocery store.) Love these sign

Original Tenant: unknown Address: 795 Monticello Ave, Norfolk, VA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  CHKD Thrift Store Photographed:  December 2019 This is one of those buildings that just feels  like it used to be a supermarket. However, it looks like I'm wrong here. I can't find any evidence that this building ever was a grocery store, using Newspapers.com and Groceteria's Norfolk list (and that includes searching alternate addresses on the streets that surround the property, just in case the "front" of the property has changed over time). The only hole is that Groceteria's list is chain stores, and it's always possible this 17,000 square foot, pitched-roof building was an independent grocer. I mean, one could be forgiven for thinking this was a supermarket, right? Either way, we're headed north of downtown tomorrow for two stores in the Ghent neighborhood, both over on The Market Report !

Original Tenant: Farm Fresh Address: 1200 N Military Hwy, Norfolk, VA Opened:  unknown Closed:  2018 Later Tenants:  subdivided Photographed:  December 2019 I captured the Janaf Farm Fresh (not the Wards Corner Farm Fresh, as I originally thought ) after its closure but before anything else had moved in. The space was later remodeled and subdivided for an Advance Auto Parts, keeping most of the facade intact. The store looked quite nice when it was still in business, and I'd guess that it was one of the newer-built Farm Fresh locations. By the way, as you may know or have guessed, there's a large military presence in Norfolk (incidentally, my uncle was stationed here for a while), giving us names like Military Highway and also the neighborhood where this store is, Janaf (or Joint Army-Navy Air Force). We have two more stores right in this area, the Food Lion across the street and the ALDI just south. Tomorrow, we head into downtown for a store here on Grocery Archaeology!

Original Tenant: Food Fair Address: 2420 E Little Creek Rd, Norfolk, VA Opened:  1950s Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  unknown > Dollar Tree Photographed:  January 2020 Gotta love the tower! This 1950s-era Food Fair has since become a Dollar Tree, but I'm not sure what else was in between. The building looks like it originally would've been around 17,000 square feet but later expanded by about 3,000 to its present size. Tomorrow we move about half a mile east for our next store on The Market Report !

Original Tenant:  Hannaford Address:  207 E Little Creek Rd, Norfolk, VA Opened:  unknown Closed:  by 2000 Later Tenants:  Kroger (2000-2018) Photographed:  December 2019 Some interesting story here: this store was originally a Hannaford, paired with a Kmart next door. When I visited, I kind of thought the exterior looked a little like a Hannaford, a chain I'm fairly familiar with, and only vaguely remembered that they ever were in this area, which is still bizarre to me. If I had to guess, Hannaford would've opened this store in the late 80s or early 90s, with Kroger moving in by 2000. It seems that Kroger would've purchased this store from Hannaford in 2000, when Delhaize bought Hannaford and had to divest some locations (those close to their existing Food Lion stores, such as this one). Interestingly enough, it seems that Kroger is trying to drive traffic to their Harris Teeter nearby, as they closed this store in 2018 and, in the same year, purchased a nearby Farm Fres

   Look at that, we're moving on to our next mid-Atlantic group tomorrow! And yes, there's a slightly different banner design here prompted definitely by my desire to update the blog's look to keep it trendy and modern, and definitely not prompted by the fact that an unfortunate incident involving an external hard drive lost about a year and a half worth of stuff that I had saved. Anyway. We are moving on to the greater Norfolk area, and this part of Virginia is referred to as Hampton Roads. Virginia Beach and Newport News are some of the other cities in this area, although we won't be visiting Newport News sadly. As I mentioned yesterday, this is not the most exciting group of stores simply because I was only in the Norfolk area for a family reunion, which is not the most conducive to photographing large quantities of supermarkets. But I was able to get some, so we'll be spending about two weeks in the Norfolk area. Come back tomorrow to jump right into a store tou

Original Tenant: unknown Address: 2625 Lankford Hwy, Exmore, VA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  Fresh Pride (closed May 2014) Photographed:  December 2019 A very interesting bit of Delmarva/Hampton Roads supermarket history here. At one time, the company that owned Fresh Pride Supermarkets owned over 50 supermarkets; by 2013, they were down to just 10, all of which closed abruptly in sequence over the course of a few months. There's not a clear explanation that I was able to find for those closures -- as opposed to the whole chain going out of business all at once, for instance, or selling some individual stores and then closing the rest. I'm not sure what the 28,000 square foot square foot store was built as, or when it was built. But the Fresh Pride signage remained here at least five years after the store's closure, as we see here in 2019. Some inadvertently nice sky in these shots, which were taken on a winter late afternoon on the way to Norfolk. A

Original Tenant: Safeway Address: 20769 Dupont Blvd, Georgetown, DE Opened:  unknown Closed:  1987 Later Tenants:  unknown Photographed:  January 2020 This is a very interesting building here in Georgetown. It's about 20,000 square feet, built around an 11,000 square foot Marina Safeway. Gotta love that arched roof! So this was built by Safeway but closed in 1987 after a dispute with the union. Safeway wanted to cut benefits and a few other things for their union employees, which the workers voted to reject; at which point Safeway decided to close six stores that would become unprofitable. This was one of the six. Shortly after that announcement was made in early 1987, Safeway walked back the decision, announcing that three of the six were not to close (and Georgetown was decided to stay open). After some further negotiations between Safeway, the union, and various local governments and organizations, Safeway agreed to not close any but to sell them all. Some went to Meatland, so

   Welcome back, everyone, to our regularly-scheduled programming of supermarket coverage! We are progressing south along the eastern seaboard of the United States, as promised, through first the Delmarva Peninsula, the first stop south of New Jersey. The peninsula extends south from the Wilmington/Newark, DE and Elkton, MD areas down through Cape Charles, VA. The entirety of the tiny state of Delaware is on the peninsula, along with the eastern part of Maryland, and the southern part of the peninsula is Virginia. The cities paralleling the peninsula on the mainland include, from north to south, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Richmond, and Norfolk is just to the south of the southern tip of the peninsula. So we're going to take a look at a few stores primarily along the US-13/113 corridor as we wander down to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which connects Cape Charles to Norfolk. Head over to  The Independent Edition  for our first Delaware stop, which is interesting, to say the leas