Grocery Archaeology

Original Grocery Tenant:  Stop & Shop Address:  1200 Park St, Frog Hollow, Hartford, CT Opened:  1968 Closed:  after 1985 Later Tenants:  subdivided Photographed:  July 9, 2023 What's today the IKASA Furniture & Mattress store and a neighboring Dollar Tree was previously a Home Mart (...where you are the star!) but originally, back in 1968, opened as a 25,000 square foot Stop & Shop with a Bradlees next door. After Stop & Shop closed -- at some point after 1985 -- Save-A-Lot opened up in the space to the right of the former supermarket, taking up around 15,000 square feet. But by 2011, the Save-A-Lot moved a few doors over and 10,000 square feet up in size, then closing in 2020. That space is now a Key Food . Tomorrow we're off to East Hartford to check out another former supermarket right here on 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 ...

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!

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!

Happy spring from Shurfine! This Spring Sale-A-Bration matchbook is a little newer than the Shurfine matchbooks I showed yesterday, with the newer logo which was used up until recently (and is still used by Shur-Save). I've mentioned that some of these matchbooks traveled quite the distance to arrive in an antique store in small-town Maine, but this one would not have had to go far at all. I unfortunately don't know where this grocery store would've been along Stone Street, since so much of that area has seen such significant development recently. But someday, when we get through the rest of New England, we will be visiting Maine! And how about this one... I had never seen this logo for Stop & Shop previously! Unfortunately, other than the name and logo, there's not much else as far as historical information goes. And moving slightly south from Maine, we enter East Pepperell, a beautiful small town (well, it's part of Pepperell) in northern Massachusetts right n...

   The Stoplight...the (unofficial) history of Stop & Shop! I'm very proud to introduce this brand-new website which will, hopefully someday, be the complete history of every Stop & Shop location. For now, it's a start with a lot of history and links to coverage that's already out there on these locations. I took on this website (which was previously in more traditional blog form) from the nice folks at A&P Preservation and Alexweb8, the past authors of the blog, earlier this fall and I've spent a few months putting together a lot of content for the website. Hope you like it! Website Homepage Directory And of course, happy new year!

Original Tenant: Stop & Shop Address: 790 US-46, Parsippany, NJ Opened:  1960s Closed:  1982 Later Tenants:  Kings Food Markets (1982-1983) > ShopRite (mid 1980s-2000) Photographed:  March 2020 Much like nearby West Caldwell , just four miles east, this mall was constructed as a Stop & Shop/Bradlees combination. The Stop & Shop was roughly 33,000 square feet with the Bradlees, now Home Depot, just shy of 100,000 square feet. When Stop & Shop left New Jersey in the early 80s, like West Caldwell, the supermarket was sold to Kings but unlike the others, the Kings lasted barely a year. Soon after closing, Sunrise ShopRite (owners of the West Caldwell store ) took over the space, then constructed a huge 64,000 square foot location just next door in 2000 (now expanded to 82,000 square feet). Kings, by the way, is based here in Parsippany where we'll be spending our next week or so. Our other post today is a small independent store in an outparcel of ...

Original Tenant: Stop & Shop Address: 225 Ridgedale Ave, Cedar Knolls, Hanover, NJ Opened: 1973 Closed:  1980 Later Tenants:  Foodtown (1980-2014) Photographed:  June 2020 What's today the Cedar Knolls Plaza was originally a small enclosed mall, the Morris County Mall, featuring a Bradlees at the north end and a Stop & Shop at the south end. The Bradlees today is a Walmart, which is not a Supercenter, and the Stop & Shop became a Michas Brothers Foodtown in 1980. In 2002, the supermarket was switched to Manyfoods, also owned by the Michas brothers, and remained under the name Foodtown; the same year, William Louttit purchased Manyfoods from the Michas family. The following year, Manyfoods was liquidated, closing its River Vale and Wanaque stores (and in fact, I believe the latter briefly became a CTown) while Cedar Knolls was purchased by the LaRacca brothers, who owned several other nearby Foodtowns. The 30,000 square foot supermarket finally closed in 201...

Original Tenant: Mayfair Foodtown Address: 120 Orlando Dr, Raritan, NJ Opened:  ca. 1987 Closed:  mid-1990s Later Tenants:  Edwards (mid-90s-2001) > Stop & Shop (2001-2017) Photographed:  January 2021 There's nothing like shopping at one of the Saker ShopRite superstores, and it seems Raritan customers agree. Six years after the Somerville location opened on the site of a former Pathmark, Stop & Shop announced they were closing this 51,000 square foot Raritan location just half a mile away from the new ShopRite. The store dates back to the 80s as a Mayfair Foodtown, which later became an Edwards and then a Stop & Shop, and remains vacant so far. Tucked away in the back of the Raritan Mall off of Route 206 (but largely inaccessible from the highway), this Stop & Shop had a rough time for quite a while. As early as 2012, Acme Style reported that the store was suffering from the ShopRite's opening. (They had more coverage in 2018 here .) The Hillsb...