Grocery Archaeology

Happy winter! I'm going to take some time off from posting, but we'll be back strong starting our look at the southeastern part of New York State (excluding, of course, New York City) on January 1st. Enjoy your holiday season, and I can't wait to see you all at the beginning of next month! In the meantime, don't miss our last few posts and the  Back in Time  feature here on Grocery Archaeology! And of course, keep your eye out for some special reports and updates over the next few weeks, too! Key Food - Upper West Side ACME Markets - Allendale, NJ Giant Farmers Market - Waldwick, NJ Trader Joe's - Forest Hills CTown - Morris Heights Antillana SuperFood - Morris Heights Food Bazaar - Ridgewood, Bushwick West, Bushwick East, and Inwood

Moving from Cape Cod to north central Massachusetts, we have a look at the small town of Ayer, MA! Unlike the Dennisport picture, I can definitely pinpoint where this picture was taken -- the train tracks give it away! (Those train tracks are now a rail trail, that I've biked up. Beautiful!) Unfortunately, though, most of these buildings no longer exist. And in case you missed it, take a look at that building on the left side of Main Street. That's the Union Cash Market! Now, Ayer doesn't have its Union Cash Market anymore, but they do have a strange  circular Shop 'n Save (well, technically the store is a tetradecagon, because it technically has 14 sides; had to do some Googling for that one). I hope you enjoyed this Back in Time feature, and I'll look for more opportunities to share old memorabilia, photos, and ads as I can!

Welcome to Dennisport, MA, a small village within the town of Dennis on Cape Cod! This undated postcard shows a view of the quaint main street, featuring a Stop & Shop grocery store! I unfortunately haven't been able to pinpoint where this location was, but there was also an A&P in town at some point. A great picture! Tomorrow we have one more postcard before we wrap up the Back in Time feature!

We've spent plenty of time in Elizabeth, NJ, but we're back to check out some old family photos! My grandmother had literal boxes upon boxes of original pictures anywhere from 1950 or so up until recent years, and these come from the earlier side of that. First we have my great-grandmother and my aunt outside the local A&P, although I'm not positive exactly where this was. I do know that it was an A&P, though. Now a picture of my aunt outside of some store, although I'm not sure if it's the same one... I love these stacks of groceries in the window! Now we're headed back up to Massachusetts tomorrow for some more historical photos.

Today's picture is admittedly not as spectacular as some of the New York City ones I've been posting the last few days, but it's still pretty cool nonetheless! I think I paid around 50 cents or a dollar for an original print of this image of the Capitol Theater in Arlington, Massachusetts at an antique store outside of Worcester, but I didn't buy it for the theater (although I love that building and sign). I bought it because you can see just the end of a grocery store to the far left of the picture! I can't determine what store this was, but it appears to be a chain (notice the "grocery stores" rather than just "grocery store"). And it looks like this picture may be from a bit earlier than the New York ones, given the age of the vehicles shown. We have a couple more days' worth of old pictures, but tomorrow is a special one!

The last picture from the collection of historical photos I bought is this one, showing an incredible street scene of a grocer in Harlem, although again, I don't have any more specific information. I don't know the date, location, or name of the store, as it was labeled only with "Harlem market" on the back. Really an incredible picture, and the amount of detail captured here is unbelievable! On the subject of these pictures in general, from my understanding, I have a reprint of each from a private collection -- to my knowledge, these were not commercial pictures, nor are they currently under copyright by anyone. But if I'm wrong about that, please let me know! On the same token, if you'd like to use these pictures, please let me know also! One more old picture tomorrow, although admittedly it's not as striking as our last three days were. Still good!

Another historical photo from the same collection as yesterday's A&P ! Today we're looking at a fruit and vegetable market somewhere in New York City, although unfortunately I don't have any more information as to location or date beyond that. Notice the promotional Sunkist signage hanging from the awning! This is a wonderful picture too, and tomorrow, we have another historical New York City picture!

At an antique store in Brooklyn, I found a few prints of very old pictures of New York City. The prints themselves weren't that old, but they were reproductions of some wonderful old pictures. I chose three of grocery stores that I had to have, and we're going to see them over the next few days! Unfortunately, I don't have locations for these pictures, beyond this one having been labeled as Brooklyn. I wouldn't be surprised if this were in a neighborhood like Bensonhurst or Bay Ridge, but I'm not really sure. While I'm far from an expert, the car looks like a late 1930s or early 1940s type, meaning this is likely to be from the 1940s or so. Come back tomorrow to check out the next picture!

We're finishing our week of old supermarket ads with a very famous name everyone here is sure to know, ACME Markets! ACME had locations in Elizabeth as well as nearby suburbs like Union  (also see here ). So many of these ads actually came from the same issue of the newspaper, with the September 24, 1975 edition having about four of the ones we have seen in the last week or so. These days, in my area of Essex County, ShopRite is the only one who still advertises in The Star-Ledger, which is all but the only newspaper left in my area. But don't worry, there's plenty more Back in Time material still to see over the next few days! Come back tomorrow for some wonderful old pictures of supermarkets!

There's nothing like a bargain! Or at least that's what Pantry Pride seemed to think in September 1975 when they ran this ad. Pantry Pride was the lower-end, more value-focused branch of Food Fair, and their stores populated the Elizabeth area at Spring and Jersey and in Elmora  (where my father later worked when it was a Foodtown), where the SuperFresh in Roselle is now, and where the Stop & Shop in Union is now. Man, I want fresh trout at 69 cents a pound. Every once in a while I'll get really nice fresh rainbow or steelhead trout and I love it. Anyway, tomorrow is our last day of ads and we are ending on a very famous name everyone here is going to know!

Here's an ad from Stop & Shop's ill-fated first foray into New Jersey, starting back in the 1960s and ending in the early 1980s with the sale of their stores to assorted competitors, including A&P, Foodtown, Kings, and others. The two stores advertised on this ad, in Garwood and Woodbridge, are now a Kings and somewhere rolled into a Home Depot in Colonia . Tomorrow is another name that has faded from the New Jersey supermarket scene, but was a big name back in the 1970s. Come back to check it out!

Finast is not a name that means anything to many contemporary northern New Jersey residents, but in 1975, having acquired the area Safeway locations the previous decade, they had a significant presence around this part of the state. This ad was valid for locations in Essex, Union, Middlesex, and Monmouth counties -- let's say the northern part of central Jersey and the southern part of north Jersey, or I guess you could say from roughly Newark to the beginning of the shore. Okay, maybe I'm just a food snob, but I don't know... something about the "Boil n' Bag Gravy & Meats" isn't particularly appealing. (That said, it's very common in commercial food establishments to get frozen bags of soups and sauces and boil them to heat -- many of those actually come out great.) This ad was a great find to preserve a little bit of Finast's history in New Jersey! Tomorrow we're going to see a name with a little more staying power than Finast. Stay tuned...

ShopRite has long been a major name in New Jersey supermarkets, but recall that in 1975, the cooperative was reeling from the loss of Supermarkets General, which in 1968 had split off and become Pathmark. It, of course, would go on to more than recover from the loss, but in 1975 the cooperative was definitely still trying to regain members and market share. In the metro New York market, by the mid-1970s, Pathmark was near the market leader, which it would become by the end of the decade (and then, if I'm not mistaken, lose the title to ShopRite in the late 1980s). In 1975, ShopRites were located in Hillside (where the current one is), Clark (replaced by the existing store in the 90s), Millburn (which recently went through a renovation ), Union (now Second Avenue since the store moved to Route 22), and Colonia -- although I'm not sure about whether that's before or after it was a Stop & Shop (later Foodtown and now The Fresh Grocer ). Although ShopRite still has a l...

Medi-Mart was admittedly a drugstore, not a supermarket, but this 1975 ad from an issue of the Daily Journal features the Stop & Shop-owned chain's Garwood location, located in the same strip mall as the Garwood Stop & Shop -- later Kings . In fact, the ad even proudly proclaims the store is "next to Stop & Shop"! As we can see, Medi-Mart sold a variety of products, from drugs to cigars, home goods to ice cream. I don't know much about Medi-Mart, though, since its life and death were all before my own. But tomorrow we're looking at an ad for a supermarket we're all very familiar with!

The Elizabeth Daily Journal started publication in Chatham, NJ as the New Jersey Journal, later moved to Elizabeth and was renamed in 1787. Remarkably, the newspaper was published until 1992, and my grandmother saved a few issues of the paper, mostly from the 1970s and 80s. While recently cleaning out her attic, I flipped through some of the papers on a hunch that I might find some supermarket ads. I was right. This Foodtown ad comes from a July 16, 1975 edition of the paper, when Foodtown had I believe two locations in Elizabeth and multiple in the surrounding communities. Its parent company, Twin County Grocers, was based just to the south in Edison. Unfortunately, though, this ad does not list the local locations at the time of publication.

April 5, 1974: Custom Meats, Inc. was celebrating the grand opening of its Huntington store in this ad scanned from an original New York Daily News page from that time. I love the part specifying "no beef priced over $1.69 lb". This is an advertisement for something that, as far as I can tell, is relatively rare -- a chain of dedicated butcher shops (as opposed to the more common chains of grocers or even produce markets). Looking at the locations where these stores were, it also appears that they were very small, so not even something like a Giunta's Meat Farms which is a true supermarket with a large meat department component. It's also an unusual collection of locations, with Long Island, Queens, Rockland, and New Jersey represented. I found this in a newspaper from my grandmother's attic, and I thought that this might be the best I can do as far as finding grocery ads in the old papers. Luckily, I was wrong! Up next is the next ad I found, which we'll be s...

  This December... step back in time with Grocery Archaeology! During our winter break, don't miss a collection of old photos, ads, postcards, and more related to grocery stores here on Grocery Archaeology! Regular posting will resume on January 1st with jumping into the start of New York State, but in the meantime, enjoy this historical collection and then some time off for our winter break. Enjoy!

Original Grocery Tenant: Grand Union Address: 111 Hulst Dr, Matamoras, PA Opened:  1993 Closed:  2001 Later Tenants:  Grand Union Family Markets (2001-2004) Photographed:  February 3, 2021 Yesterday we saw a former Grand Union that has remained a supermarket since, and today, we're going to check out one that closed almost 20 years ago. The Westfall Town Center was originally built with a 115,000 square foot Kmart and a 40,000 square foot Grand Union. The latter was subdivided in 2004 with multiple tenants including a movie theater, and the former was subdivided in late 2021, with 73,000 square feet of it going to ShopRite. That replaced the now-closed Montague store  just two miles east across in New Jersey. Tomorrow we're headed to the other supermarket in Matamoras on The Market Report , which is also our last Pennsylvania store!

Original Grocery Tenant: A&P Address: 5684 PA-115, Blakeslee, PA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  Ahart's Thriftway (open by 1976) > Ahart's Market Photographed:  October 15, 2023 Time for a little bonus post! A commenter on a Flickr photo says this 15,000 square foot was originally an A&P, but by 1976, it was Ahart's Thriftway. By 1998, it was still a Thriftway, and the following year, the newer location had been opened across the street. I'm not clear whether it opened as a Thriftway and later switched to Great Valu, or if it has been a Great Valu since it opened. Now for a look at what's next door... A 45,000 square foot former Jamesway at the other end of the strip mall is now a somewhat strange indoor flea market, but it definitely has signs of its Jamesway past, including the fact that the flea market sign is a banner over the old Jamesway sign. In the bathrooms, we have a more explicit indication... The strip mall is now mostly...

Original Grocery Tenant: ACME Markets Address: 24 Main Ave, Hawley, PA Opened:  1950s Closed:  1994 Later Tenants:  Insalaco's (1994-1995) > Dutch's Market (1995-2006) > IGA (2006-2014) > Dollar General (2015- ) Photographed:  December 18, 2019 and May 28, 2023 Hawley, PA is a delightful quaint little town on the shores of Lake Wallenpaupack, a very interesting manmade lake (where you can also take a beautiful boat tour). This 13,000 square foot store was built in the 1950s by ACME and then closed in 1994, but here's where it gets interesting. Insalaco's was apparently here for just a year, opening in 1994 and closing in 1995. Dutch's Market, which has another location in Greentown which we'll be touring in a few days, was here from 1995 to 2006, at which point the store closed and was sold to the owners of the other supermarket in town, the Lake Region IGA. It operated as an IGA until 2014 (after it was beginning to close in 2011, but extended briefl...

Original Grocery Tenant: Giant Market Address: 1199 Texas Palmyra Hwy, Honesdale, PA Opened:  ca. 1972 Closed:  1993 Later Tenants:  Insalaco's > subdivided Photographed:  May 28, 2023 This 25,000 square foot store was built as a Giant Market at the eastern end of the Route 6 Mall at some point around 1972 before becoming an Insalaco's. Insalaco's then moved to a former Kmart, before ultimately becoming a Weis . As AFB pointed out a few months ago (which I didn't know), there were actually four  Giant chains at one point or another. Giant-MD and Giant-PA, of course, both of which are now owned by Ahold. There was also a chain in the Binghamton area, mostly acquired by Weis; and yet another (which I didn't realize was separate from the Binghamton chain), based in Scranton and at its peak, with 25 locations. In 1971, the Scranton-based Giant Market grew from 20 to 25 stores with the acquisition of five Food Fair stores. The chain declared bankruptcy in 1983,...

  Welcome to the Poconos! The Poconos are the mountains running between Stroudsburg and the Wyoming Valley. We're going to start to the east of Carbondale in Waymart, where we'll see a store that recently changed ownership. Then we'll roughly continue east along route 6 with some stops to the south in Greentown, Daleville, Blakeslee, Mount Pocono, and Mountainhome, then moving east to the Port Jervis area for Milford and Matamoras. Believe it or not, then we're completely done with Pennsylvania! Of course, not nearly all of the grocery stores in Pennsylvania, but just the relatively few stores I've actually been to and have pictures of. There's a lot of wilderness in this area, with state forests and game lands surrounding us, so we'll be seeing a lot of small stores in small towns. But it means a lot of interesting stuff, including lots of independent stores! We're going to begin with a store in Waymart tomorrow on  The Independent Edition !

Original Grocery Tenant:  Garcia's Market Address: 824 Pittston Ave, South Side, Scranton, PA Opened:  1999 Closed:  ca. 2014 Later Tenants:  vacant, now demolished Photographed:  December 22, 2018 Today's store is a small former grocer on the south side of Scranton. The roughly 1,000 square foot space held several tenants over the years -- a furniture store in the 1940s, a florist in the 1960s, and a hair salon in the early 1990s -- before becoming Garcia's Market in 1999. Garcia's opened a second store diagonally across the street at 901 Pittston at some point, which later became a Super Natural Produce. We're going to check that store out tomorrow on The Independent Edition ! And very important... yesterday we took a look at the brand-new SuperFresh in Middlesex on The Market Report! Don't miss it, and check it out here !

Original Grocery Tenant:  A&P Address: 3516 Birney Ave, Moosic, PA Opened:  1960s Closed:  1969 Later Tenants:  A-Mart (1969-after 1971) Photographed:  August 12, 2020 Today's snapshot is the former A&P of Moosic, where we visited a store that's held a parade of different banners, ending up with The Fresh Grocer , just down the street. As we can tell in the above picture, the roughly 17,000 square foot store was a centennial store when it opened in the 1960s, then became an A&P-owned A-Mart Discount Foods location in 1969, which was in business at least through 1971 (although I can't find any ads that list the location after that year). After A-Mart, I'm not sure if there was another grocer here, but it eventually hosted a variety of other tenants including a mattress store and a car dealer, which it remains today. I mentioned the ShopRite in Moosic a lot in the Gerrity's post, and tomorrow we'll see the ShopRite just before it opened on The Market ...

    Moving on to the northern part of the Wyoming Valley! This time we're looking at stores in and around Scranton, ranging from Moosic to the southwest of the city, into the city itself, and then to the northeast of the city through Peckville, Archbald, Mayfield, Carbondale, and Forest City. It's a relatively brief survey of the area, but we'll see a fair number of stores in the time we're here which will be a little less than a month. With around 76,000 people, Scranton is the largest city in this part of Pennsylvania, and the seventh-largest in Pennsylvania overall. Like the Wilkes-Barre area, we'll be touring quite a few Gerrity's, but there are also a lot of independents in this area. Lots of exciting stuff is coming soon, starting with a Gerrity's tomorrow on  The Market Report ! Also today... two special reports over in Manhattan! Wegmans - Astor Place, Manhattan, NY SuperFresh - Two Bridges, Manhattan, NY

Original Grocery Tenant: Kunec's Market Address: 302 Maffett St, Wilkes-Barre, PA Opened:  by 1946 Closed:  by 2017 Later Tenants:  vacant Photographed:  December 22, 2018 At the corner of Maffett and Hollenback Streets in northern Wilkes-Barre sits this 1800 square foot store. Unfortunately, Kunec's Market closed by 2017 after more than 70 years in business. The store was open by 1946. I think by the end, Kunec's was mostly a deli and butcher shop, but it appears it was once more of a full grocery store. The store closed by 2017 but then in 2018 was condemned. Despite that, by 2022, it was still standing but further deteriorated. It's possible that the apparently hand-painted Kunec's Market signage was original to the store's opening, if likely restored later. Like Harry's , I wish I could've gotten to this store when it was still open, but I'm glad I got there soon after it closed. All I can do is keep visiting grocery stores, especially interes...