Grocery Archaeology

Original Grocery Tenant: Bravo Supermarkets (?) Address: 1245 W 7th St, South Plainfield, NJ Opened:  1983 Closed:  2022 Later Tenants:  Tropical Supermarket (coming soon) Photographed:  March 3, 2023 Welcome back to South Plainfield! You may not remember our first visit here, so feel free to refresh your memory . Back in 2020, I saw an outdated, clearly struggling store and wondered how it was able to survive in that condition, not to mention with a smaller but better-run competitor all but across the street. Turns out it wasn't, and the store closed in 2022. Shortly thereafter, the landlord announced they had signed a lease with seven-store Key Food-affiliated chain Tropical Supermarkets. I visited in early March to find the store stripped of all of its Bravo branding, but no signage on the building itself. There was a sign at the end of the parking lot... ...but the massive sign for the strip mall had a giant blank panel at the top where the Bravo logo used to ...

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 907 Oak Tree Rd, South Plainfield, NJ Opened:  late 90s Closed:  2015 Later Tenants:  ACME Markets (2015-2018) > ALDI (2020-present) Photographed:  July 2020 Sadly, not a whole lot to see here at the former A&P-turned-ACME in South Plainfield. A&P moved here in the late 90s from the Futurestore across the street, which became a ShopRite in 2016. Check out pictures of the store as an A&P here and as an ACME here . The ACME did look pretty good especially after the Quality Built renovation, but the reality is (as much as I really do love ACME) none of their stores are half as good as the latest Saker ShopRites. So ALDI moved in to part of the space, opening in December of 2016 . I was hoping to get to the store before any substantial renovation was done so that I could take a look inside, but it had already all been demolished inside. ALDI moved here from a different, older former ACME just up Park Avenue in South Pl...

Original Tenant: Food Fair Address: 138 South Plainfield Ave, South Plainfield, NJ Opened:  1959 Closed:  1965 Later Tenants:  Drug Fair (1977-2009) > Walgreens (2009-2016) > Dollar General (2020-present) Photographed:  July 2020 Just across the street from Green Olive is this 21,000 square foot former Food Fair, later Drug Fair and Walgreens before becoming Dollar General in early 2020. The construction for Dollar General actually revealed the wonderful midcentury modern tower sign under that boring rectangle on the far left of the building. It's unclear whether Dollar General dismantled and replaced that sign, or whether they simply built around it. Either way, this building is distinctly supermarket-like. I've mentioned the former A&P and Pathmark in South Plainfield several times now, so tomorrow we're going to get to take a look at both, one on  The Market Report  and one here on Grocery Archaeology!

Original Tenant: A&P Address: 2328 Plainfield Ave, South Plainfield, NJ Opened:  early 1960s Closed:  mid 1990s Later Tenants:  CVS (1995-present) Photographed:  July 2020 Quite the find here tucked away on a small street in South Plainfield's residential district! This store -- of just 16,000 square feet -- was built in the early- to mid-60s as a Centennial A&P, and remarkably not just made it to the mid-90s as an A&P, but was actually extensively upgraded. The bulky facade we see here is a scaled-down, if unsuccessfully so, version of the facade we can also find in Peekskill and LaGrangeville , among others. But Peekskill was double this store's size, at 32,000 square feet, and LaGrangeville was just under that at about 31,00 square feet. Highly unusual to see such a major upgrade on such a small store. I believe, though I'm not entirely sure, that this facade was coupled with the Sav-A-Center branding and decor package, and that that store model was...