Grocery Archaeology

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 755 W Lancaster Ave, Bryn Mawr, PA Opened:  1950s Closed:  1970s Later Tenants:  Staples (1990s- ) Photographed:  December 2021 Our first of two stops in Bryn Mawr, PA (right between Haverford College to the southeast and Villanova University to the northwest) is this 1950s-era A&P. It's a fascinating store, not least because it's been only minimally modified in the last 50 years. It was built in the 50s as a flat-front , streetfront store of roughly 12,000 square feet -- not to mention hiding a very slight arched roof back there. In the late 50s or early 60s, it was retrofitted into an approximation of the centennial store model, which we just saw yesterday at Gladwyne -- albeit extensively remodeled. As we notice, the centennial front is very clearly just a facade here, and consequently it is abnormally thin. It's also overly simple, compared to the ornate full-fledged centennial . And finally, we know it's an earlier store bec

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 1025 Youngs Ford Rd, Gladwyne, PA Opened:  1960s Closed:  1983 Later Tenants:  SuperFresh (1983-2015) > ACME Markets (2015-2019) Photographed:  December 2021 Gladwyne, PA is currently without a supermarket, since its ACME Markets location closed in February of 2019. Although the community lost its roughly 25,000 square foot ACME, its tiny but remarkable 1400 square foot Gladwyne Market House is still going strong just across the street. But wait, let's back up and review the history of this location. From the history I can piece together, this store opened in the 1960s as an A&P Centennial store at roughly 15,000 square feet. At some point thereafter, probably in the 1970s, it was expanded again by around 6,000 square feet. It looks like at the same time, an additional 2,000 square foot storefront (presumably a bank) was constructed out of the expansion, but was not part of the supermarket. I assume the store received the standard 1970s

It's time to enter Pennsylvania! If you got a little bored with my coverage of the mid-Atlantic region (and, I'll admit, there were a fair number of pretty boring stores and bad drive-by pictures, especially in Norfolk), now is the time to tune back in. We are back, just west of New Jersey, in the Philadelphia area! We're going to begin our coverage in the eastern part of the Main Line, a stretch of Philadelphia suburbs along US-30, which is the Lincoln Highway. In that area, we'll make stops in Gladwyne, Bryn Mawr, Wynnewood, and Narberth before entering the Philadelphia city limits for a look at stores around Carroll Park, Cathedral Park, and University City. My coverage of Philadelphia is not quite as dense as northern New Jersey nor northeastern Pennsylvania, but it's pretty solid, and we certainly have quite a few interesting stops as we move through the area from south to north, roughly. We begin with a look at a very small independent grocer in Gladwyne over

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 14478 Jefferson Davis Hwy, Woodbridge, VA Opened:  1960s Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  Carquest Photographed:  December 2021 Keeping with our patriotic theme for the 4th of July, we are seeing the Americana Grocery at the north end of this strip mall and the former Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company location at the southern end! This centennial A&P is roughly 19,000 square feet and is almost a perfect square, which is not the model I'm more familiar with (many of the centennials in the northern NJ area are long and thin, though that's frequently because they were retrofitted into existing stores or other buildings). Tomorrow, we move about another mile north to our next Latin supermarket over on The Independent Edition !