216 Old Tappan Rd, Old Tappan, NJ

Original Tenant: Finast
Address: 216 Old Tappan Rd, Old Tappan, NJ

Opened: 1980s

Closed: 1998

Later Tenants: Vitale Foodtown (??-1998) > A&P (1998-2015) > Estevez Foodtown (2015-2019)

Photographed: December 2020

Today's store is one I was very excited to get to. It's about three miles to the southeast of yesterday's former A&P, although you couldn't actually drive like that because there's a lake between the stores. This was a Vitale Foodtown until 1998, when it became an A&P. When A&P went under, it was taken over by Estevez Foodtown, which in turn closed in 2019, leaving a 34,000 square foot vacancy in this strangely laid out mall. The store's interior has barely been touched since then.

The store's interior was remodeled by Estevez, although the bones of the A&P decor remained just like Hastings-On-Hudson. Let's take a closer look for the labelscar...

Okay, so we can definitely make out the A&P Fresh labelscar and the Foodtown labelscar on top of that. Check out pictures and interior shots over on A&P Preservation here. But there's something else that puzzled me...

I'm almost positive we can make out an italic version of the word Foodtown with an underline. Like this. (That's Denville.) In fact, that's exactly what we're looking at here. Note that the newer Foodtown logo is mounted on a blue panel, meaning there wouldn't be labelscars for each individual letter, only the outline (and we can make out the top of the flag in the top right corner). So that means... this labelscar actually dates back to the Vitale days, with the sign probably installed in the late 90s. Cool!

Now let's check out what we can see inside through the entrance doors...

All the decor is still on the walls, and the fixtures are mostly still in place too!

And man, that decor is looking better than what's in Hastings. I'm not sure if those posts are actually blue on top or if that was just a trick of the lighting.

Some sandwich board signs no longer in use here, too. The next door on the front wall was strange to me...

Access to the store's basement from the front wall. Looks like you can also get in through the entrance foyer...

Foodtown sign spotted in the exit foyer.

Let's peek in through the front windows (beyond the A&P Store Hours decal still left there) to see what's in this part of the store, shall we?

Exit door inside is opened, with the self-checkouts removed. Foodtown did not replace A&P's registers...

The greeting cards are even still there!

We can see the dairy and frozen coolers still intact, along with all the dairy decor on the right side wall. We also see the back of a service department here, which I'm assuming is the bakery.

This is a bit of an odd setup. Would people have been able to look right in at the back of the bakery when the store was in business? My gut tells me Foodtown installed this department, but I have no idea if that's true.

That's as good of a picture of the dairy decor as we're going to get, but definitely zoom in to see it closer.

Wrapping up with one more shot of the registers. Up next we're going to head about two miles south to our next former supermarket, tomorrow here on Grocery Archaeology, but unfortunately it's not nearly as exciting as this one. But stay tuned anyway!