Grocery Archaeology

Original Grocery Tenant: A&P Address: 5684 PA-115, Blakeslee, PA Opened:  unknown Closed:  unknown Later Tenants:  Ahart's Thriftway (open by 1976) > Ahart's Market Photographed:  October 15, 2023 Time for a little bonus post! A commenter on a Flickr photo says this 15,000 square foot was originally an A&P, but by 1976, it was Ahart's Thriftway. By 1998, it was still a Thriftway, and the following year, the newer location had been opened across the street. I'm not clear whether it opened as a Thriftway and later switched to Great Valu, or if it has been a Great Valu since it opened. Now for a look at what's next door... A 45,000 square foot former Jamesway at the other end of the strip mall is now a somewhat strange indoor flea market, but it definitely has signs of its Jamesway past, including the fact that the flea market sign is a banner over the old Jamesway sign. In the bathrooms, we have a more explicit indication... The strip mall is now mostly...

Original Grocery Tenant: A&P Address: 1213 E Broad St, Tamaqua, PA Opened:  1970s Closed:  1993 Later Tenants:  Ahart's Thriftway (1993-1999) > BRL Grocery Outlet (closed 2018) Photographed:  November 29, 2019 We're now just outside of Tamaqua, a town of around 7000 which these days has a Boyer's right downtown, where we're headed tomorrow. The town also used to have a second supermarket, built as an A&P that closed in 1993 and became an Ahart's Thriftway. Around 2000, the space became a BRL Grocery Outlet, a local chain of discount grocery stores also referred to as Buy Rite Liquidators. They also took a former ACME in Coal Township, seen here . BRL closed in 2018 and mostly cleared out the space, except for some assorted shopping carts and some refrigerator cases seen at the back of the store. It's lucky there were lights on inside! As you can see in the first picture, I was here after dark, so it was just good luck that we can actually see inside...

Original Grocery Tenant:  Delray's Thriftway Address: 322 W Bridge St, New Hope, PA Opened:  1979 Closed:  1999 Later Tenants:  Clemens (1999-2006) > SuperFresh (2006-2015) Photographed:  January 12, 2021 Just next door from yesterday's McCaffrey's  is this former supermarket, today a gym and physical therapy facility. This facility is slightly smaller than the McCaffrey's at around 22,000 square feet. It was constructed in 1979 as Delray's Thriftway with the rest of the strip mall, then 20 years later became a Clemens which in turn was sold to SuperFresh in 2006. SuperFresh closed in 2015, with the current tenant opening a few years after that. By the way, we are directly across the river from Lambertville, NJ, where we saw the former ACME . That store is a little over a mile east over the border. Up next we're headed around 7 miles north along the Delaware River for tomorrow's snapshot, over on The Independent Edition !

Original Tenant:  Penn Fruit Address: 5147 Frankford Ave, Frankford, Philadelphia, PA Opened:  1955 Closed:  1978 Later Tenants:  Holiday Thriftway (ca. 1979-2016) Photographed:  July 2021 There are a few supermarkets out there, current and former, that are absolute classics that every supermarket fan knows about. This is surely in the top 5 best-known current and former supermarkets in this area (maybe the east coast?). In 1955, the Penn Fruit company built a roughly 16,000 square foot arched-roof supermarket at Frankford and Pratt in Philadelphia. To them at the time, it was not a particularly remarkable location -- just another store of the type they were building across the region at the time. The Penn Fruit closed in 1978 and was replaced shortly thereafter by Holiday Thriftway, which had a few locations around Philadelphia at various times. And at some point, it was expanded to just under 28,000 square feet with an additional 6,000 square feet of retail i...

Original Tenant: SuperFresh (previously Grant City/Clover) Address:  650 W Cuthbert Blvd, Westmont, Haddon Township, NJ Opened:  1997 Closed:  2011 Later Tenants:  Thriftway (2013-2016) > Target Photographed:  January 2021 We're in the Westmont section of Haddon Township today, visiting two stores. They're less than half a mile apart, with this former SuperFresh/Thriftway just down Cuthbert Boulevard from the ACME . While this SuperFresh , which replaced an older store converted from A&P in the same strip mall, was far more modern than the ACME, the ACME has managed to not only outlive the SuperFresh (which closed in 2011) but the subsequent Crystal Lake Thriftway (which occupied the space from 2013 to 2016). They moved from an older location in town. Check out the progression of the space here , and check out Acme Style's interior photos of the Thriftway soon after opening here . Target has done some interesting but relatively limited modifications to...

Original Tenant: Mayfair Foodtown Address: 5100 N Crescent Blvd, Pennsauken, NJ Opened:  unknown Closed:  1991 Later Tenants:  unidentified Thriftway (1991-mid 90s) > Brown's Thriftway (mid 90s-1999) > Supremo Food Market (1999-ca. 2010) > Trujillo Thriftway (ca. 2010-ca. 2015) Photographed:  January 2021 This store, located at the corner of Browning Road and Crescent Boulevard (route 130) in Pennsauken, has quite the history which I'm going to attempt to piece together here. The earliest tenant I could find for the property was Mayfair Foodtown, which may or may not have been the original tenant (Mayfair, and Foodtown in general, tended to move into closed stores rather than build their own, but it's hard to say here). Mayfair closed in 1991 here, selling the store to a Thriftway owner who I haven't been able to identify. By the mid-1990s, that owner went bankrupt and the store was sold to a former ShopRite owner, later Melmarkets Foodtown executive, Stev...

Original Tenant: Risoldi's Thriftway Address: 3100 Quakerbridge Rd, Hamilton, NJ Opened:  1970s Closed:  2019 Later Tenants:  none Photographed:  January 2021 The roughly 40,000 square foot Risoldi's Market (a Great Valu store, previously Risoldi's Thriftway and before that, in a different location in town, the Liberty Thriftway) opened in the 1970s and closed in 2019 . So I was just about a year and a half too late to photograph it in business, but we do get to see inside. My interior pictures were a little limited because work was going on at the time and I was getting some strange looks from the construction workers. While I haven't heard anything about what might be going into the majority of the supermarket space, a ShopRite liquor store is taking about 10-20,000 square feet of the store. It was a good-looking exterior, but I've never seen an interior picture of the supermarket in business, and it's really hard to tell what the interior would've look...