Grocery Archaeology

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 3 Lafayette Rd, Fords, Woodbridge, NJ Opened:  mid-1950s Closed:  1990s Later Tenants:  Favorites at Woodbridge Photographed:  July 2020 Finishing up our A&P streak here on Grocery Archaeology with this 23,000 square foot former centennial store (you can still barely see the roofline intact behind the new facade). Given that this store opened in the mid-1950s -- it was open by 1958, before A&P's actual centennial the following year -- it was probably built as a more nondescript boxy store model and later converted to a centennial. By the late 1990s, the store moved up to downtown Woodbridge , and that store later closed in 2011. A&P also had a larger store, a former Stop & Shop, just to the southwest about a mile and a half in Edison, which we'll see when we get to Edison. While this wraps up our core Woodbridge coverage, we still have one more store to see within the municipal limits, out in the Hopelawn section ri...

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 789 St. Georges Ave, Woodbridge, NJ Opened:  1990s Closed:  2011 Later Tenants:  Crunch Fitness / LIDL Photographed:  July 2020 We're just to the north of downtown Woodbridge to see a store that's either on St. George Ave or St. Georges Ave, depending on who you ask. The store seems to have been a combined replacement for closed stores at 1555 St Georges in Avenel and 3 Lafayette Rd in Fords, both smaller stores and both in different unincorporated communities within Woodbridge. Avenel was a former Stop & Shop acquired in the 1980s while Fords was a renovated centennial. This store closed in 2011 and sat vacant for several years before opening as a Crunch Fitness in 2015. Despite the time lags, the store still sports its original 1990s A&P facade although it's been repainted. Today, LIDL also occupies a portion of the store. We'll be seeing Fords but first we have to tour the (still-open) grocery store just across the high...

Our next group of stores continues just to the south along the eastern edge of the state from Elizabeth. Beginning in Carteret, we'll be wandering through Iselin, an unincorporated part of Woodbridge Township inland a bit (along with a few stops just over the border in Edison along the way) before passing through Metuchen, Fords, and Hopelawn (between Iselin and Perth Amboy), and finally ending up in downtown Perth Amboy where we'll take a look at most of the grocery stores there. In the interest of keeping the groups more geographically focused and shorter, this will only take up the next two and a half weeks or so but we'll be seeing stores here as well as on  The Independent Edition  and  The Market Report . Come back to The Market Report tomorrow to see our first stop to the north! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! We have some updates at a few stores we've previously toured! Check them out here: SuperFresh - Passaic, NJ Stop & Shop - Allwood, Clifton, NJ ShopRite - B...