Grocery Archaeology

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 5 Lenape Rd, Andover, NJ Opened:  1970s Closed:  late 90s Later Tenants:  The Open Box Shop Photographed:  April 2020 Quite the interesting former A&P here in Andover, along route 206 just south of Newton. Now, it's not exactly a surprise that a supermarket couldn't survive here. This roughly 30,000 square foot store is located smack in the middle of this town of just 600 people. It's about five miles from the large stores we saw in Newton and roughly four miles north of the ShopRite in Byram. This store likely closed as an A&P in the late 1990s, and was an A&P Sav-A-Center in its final days. Acme Style has coverage of the store from back in 2009, when the A&P decor was all still up on the walls. We'll take a brief look inside now that The Open Box Shop, a discout store, has set up shop inside. As Acme Style writes, it's a very strange property constructed around an existing older stone building. The supermarket a...

  Remember a while back when we switched from doing things county-by-county onto going by cities and regions? Well, Sussex County is a pretty sparse county, and its total population is slightly smaller than that of the city of Paterson, so we're actually going to see just 14 grocery stores and 1 former supermarket in the entire county. So I'm not sure it makes sense to split it up any further. Sussex County is when we're going to really start to feel like we're out in the country. We're going to start in Sparta just north of Jefferson on route 15 and move north through Franklin, Vernon, and Sussex before going all the way up to the very northern tip of the state for Montague. And that is officially where we end our journey up from Freehold to the north central part of the state! From there, we will begin our final descent -- we will then be traveling from Montague down along the west border of the state, through Branchville, Newton, Andover, and Byram. When we finis...