Some former supermarkets have been so badly butchered or, depending on how you look at it, so well reinvented, that you can't tell that it was ever a grocery store. Some look like they just closed yesterday. Others fall in the middle -- they still have the bones of the supermarket, but have been extensively altered. Today's Snapshot falls in that last category.
Yes, this building is now a Walgreens, and it was previously a Drug Fair. But you don't have to imagine too much to see it as a former A&P centennial-style store. Obviously the existing facade has been extensively covered, but the shape is still there. And the entrance still faces the parking lot on the side, just like it would have in the A&P days. I wasn't able to get extensive coverage, but there are still loading docks in the back also. The store has a basement, which is a no-brainer because it's on a hill meaning that the lower level is ground level in the back. I'd driven by this store a million times, but I didn't know it was an A&P until much more recently.
Photographed May 2019
Not too far away is a former Acme A-frame store that's been living life as a Jeep dealership. The original building is barely visible behind a large vestibule (probably constructed to disguise the structure's roots).
ReplyDeleteYou are correct, and that store will be coming soon to The Market Report!
DeleteThis store opened on November 3, 1970 as an A-Mart Discount Foods (and obviously later became just a regular A&P). As a matter of fact, many A&P locations spent part of their lives as A-Marts, including those in Bernardsville, Chatham, Fanwood, Fords, Park Ridge, and Parsippany. And just two days prior, on 11/1/70, another newly built A-Mart opened: a supermarket at 3127 Route 27 in South Brunswick/Kendall Park.
ReplyDeleteThe Verona A&P closed in late May 1994. (A photo in the June 2, 1994 edition of The Verona-Cedar Grove Times showed workers removing the A&P sign from the Centennial building.) The Drug Fair opened no later than October 20 of that year and was converted to Walgreens in May 2009.
The (IMO) ugly renovations to the store's exterior facade were made by Drug Fair and most likely occurred during the months in between the closing of the A&P and the opening of Drug Fair. An October 2007 street view of the store on Google Maps (the earliest such view available) shows that the building's facade was the same as it is today, and a 2002 aerial view shows the same thing. (The 1995 view that is provided on HistoricAerials.com is very blurry.)
--A&P Fan
Thanks for the history here!
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