Grocery Archaeology

Original Grocery Tenant:  Grand Union Address: 1581 US-202, Pomona, NY Opened:  late 1970s Closed:  2001 Later Tenants:  Stop & Shop (2001-2020) > Evergreen Uptown (2022- ) Photographed:  June 2, 2021 Welcome back to the former Stop & Shop of Pomona, NY! The 51,000 square foot store was built around 1978 as a Grand Union as a much smaller building, then renovated and expanded by Grand Union in the late 1990s. Stop & Shop acquired the location in 2001 at the time of Grand Union's bankruptcy, then closed in August 2020. We saw the store still open in 2020, too. I revisited over the summer of 2021 after the Stop & Shop had closed and the new tenant, Evergreen, a kosher supermarket, was preparing to move in. As I've said, there is a large (and growing) Orthodox Jewish population in Rockland County and much of this part of the state, making it harder and harder for traditional supermarkets like this Stop & Shop to survive. There's a ShopRite ...

Original Grocery Tenant: Grand Union Address: 32 S Middletown Rd, Nanuet, NY Opened:  1990s Closed:  2001 Later Tenants:  Stop & Shop (2001-2022) > Floor & Decor Photographed:  August 12, 2022 This store doesn't look much like a Grand Union, and that's thanks to an extensive exterior renovation by Stop & Shop, but it was constructed as one in the 1990s replacing an older store across the street. The 58,000 square foot store was sold to Stop & Shop in Grand Union's bankruptcy in 2001, then moved across the street into a former Fairway Market at the Shops at Nanuet in 2020. If we look carefully and use our imagination a little bit, we can tell this building has Grand Union-style bones. The middle segment is clearly new, but built around a distinctive Grand Union awning. There wasn't that much time between Stop & Shop's closure and the repurposing of the location as a Floor & Decor -- only about two years -- but I managed to get there and ...

Original Grocery Tenant: Grand Union Address: 420 Market St, Nanuet, NY Opened:  ca. 1970s Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  subdivided Photographed:  August 12, 2022 Another Grocery Archaeology post, another Grand Union . This one was around 30,000 square feet and constructed in the 1970s just south of what's now the Shops at Nanuet which was formerly the Nanuet Mall. At some point, around the early 1990s, Grand Union moved roughly across the street to a new-build, 58,000 square foot store. We have two posts today, and our other stop is in the same strip mall as this store -- with a fair bit of Grand Union history itself. Check it out here . Tomorrow, we're seeing the newer Grand Union on  Grocery Archaeology  as well as the Stop & Shop across the street on  The Market Report !

Original Grocery Tenant: Grand Union Address: 140 Orange Ave, Suffern, NY Opened:  between 1953 and 1965 Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants Photographed:  December 15, 2020 We're near the Hudson River -- about 12 miles west -- and you know what that means: Grand Union territory. The New Jersey-based chain had locations all up and down the river in New York state, as far north as Rouses Point a mile from the Canada border all the way south to here in Suffern, where we're less than half a mile to the New Jersey line. This one was built between 1953 and 1965, but unfortunately I don't know when it closed. It's possible, though, it closed in the 1970s when Grand Union constructed a new store around two miles east out on route 59 -- but the stores are far enough away that it's also possible that store's opening didn't affect this one. The 16,000 square foot location just south of downtown Suffern is today the Rainbow Ace Hardware. O...

Original Grocery Tenant: Grand Union Address: 191 Jersey Ave, Port Jervis, NY Opened:  between 1957 and 1963 Closed:  by 2001 Later Tenants:  Dollar General/subdivided Photographed:  February 3, 2021 Our first Sullivan/Orange county store is here in Port Jervis! Remember when we saw Matamoras just recently, with the Grand Union and the Price Chopper ? We're a little over two miles east, across the river, from Matamoras. This building bears some similarities to A&P Centennials, but is just different enough that we can place its lineage to Grand Union and not A&P. The 23,000 square foot store, which is close to a square rather than the more typical rectangular building shape, was built between 1957 and 1963, and may have closed when the more modern Matamoras store opened in 1993. At some point after that, it was subdivided and now is mostly occupied by a Dollar General. So as far as I can tell, this was never an A&P, something that apparently confused Jo...

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 Tenant: Grand Union Address: 1750 Whitehorse Mercerville Rd, Hamilton, NJ Opened:  1970s Closed:  late 1980s Later Tenants:  Laurenti ShopRite (late 1980s-late 1990s) > Big V ShopRite (late 1990s-2002) Photographed:  January 2021 Well everybody, allow me to introduce one of the coolest abandoned supermarkets I've ever visited. This beauty of an eyesore takes up 33,000 square feet of a 63,000 square foot totally-abandoned strip mall on Whitehorse Mercerville Road in the Hamilton Square part of Hamilton Township. An additional 45,000 square feet next door -- likely previously a department store -- is now a self-storage facility (see before and after here). Google Maps caught the abandoned strip  after all the tenants closed but before the property was blocked off . I was able to wander in to this mall, which is all still supposed to be available retail space, for some very cool exclusive interior photos. (To my knowledge, no one else has gotten int...

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...