SuperFresh
Owner: Howard Lee / Food World Supermarkets
Another update for today is a return to the SuperFresh at 550 Raritan Road in Roselle. These first two pictures were taken in June of 2021 during a shopping trip here. The store had held up very well four years out from opening, and I enjoyed stopping here for some groceries which I did frequently over the summer of 2021. Why am I writing about this store in the past tense?
In September, the roof of the 1950s-era building collapsed in Hurricane Ida (which, a few miles to the northeast in the Elmora part of Elizabeth, submerged parked cars on Elmora Avenue and flooded nearly all the businesses in the Elmora business district). The store sat for a long time as the borough was very slow to inspect the structure and deemed it unsafe for occupancy. During this time, of several weeks, no one was permitted to enter the facility, meaning that all the food had to sit on the shelves and rot, which the neighbors were unhappy about for good reason.
While this store's lease is of course unique, according to a real estate lawyer at one of the largest law firms in New Jersey that I spoke with, this repair almost definitely falls on the landlord, not the tenant. This is I believe the only Lee/Food World-owned supermarket at which the supermarket operator doesn't own the property. And that reconstruction process can be very slow, especially if the landlord is going through their insurance for the construction costs. Starting with the photo above, all these pictures are from post-collapse. As of late November 2021, when I visited, no construction at all had started.
Main entrance closed off with this prominent closure poster. Notice how explicitly it says the store is temporarily closed due to storm damage, so I do think the store will reopen at some point. The operator may decide, though, if the reconstruction takes too long or if they are responsible for any of the costs, to pull out and give up on this store (which would, of course, be a shame).
Looking in through the window next to the main entrance in the front. We can see the store was emptied of food at some point after the borough did their initial inspection (which didn't happen until nearly a month after the store closed, from what I understand), and that some of the fixtures were moved around. Produce and grocery aisles to the left, registers and customer service along the wall to the right. We can also see the rear entrance straight ahead.
Looking over to where the grocery shelving would've been. I assume the store owners will try to salvage as much of that as they can, but it does appear the store also flooded (whether from rising water from below or from rain water coming in through the roof), so it might be tricky to save any of the fixtures. See the light coming in to the left? Yeah, that's from the giant hole in the roof. We'll get there.
Here's the exit doors on the side of the store, facing Raritan Road.
And in back, we have the outdoor/seasonal sales display near the rear entrance. Taking a look around the rear of the property...
You wouldn't know that the roof isn't intact from this view. Looks like some shelving was removed and stored to the back of the parking lot there.
And we do have a dumpster out in the parking lot here. I didn't go dumpster diving but I assume it's just for whatever needed to be discarded. I have to imagine the discarded food took up more than that small dumpster and that it would've been taken away promptly.
Rear entrance, which is now closed off too.
Here's the other side of the seasonal display area.
Unfortunately, not much to see from looking in the back door here.
But we do have this taped to the rear (and front) doors. Three months later, no progress as far as I know.
Another temporarily closed poster on the rear entrance, held up in part by C&S tape (this SuperFresh, along with the other Key Food stores, was previously supplied by C&S but switched to UNFI recently).
Unfortunate photo of a construction permit taped to the window next to the back door, which I was hoping was for storm damage reconstruction, but instead was for the landlord's facade renovation -- which was supposed to start in 2018, as dated in the top right corner here. Now we're going to head back around the side to check out the storm damage...
These are the best pictures I got of the interior damage. There are no windows on that side of the store, so what we're seeing is quite simply a big ol' hole in the roof. Clearly this is going to require pretty extensive structural remodeling, as well as the other restoration around the building. Do you think they're waiting for warmer weather? Wouldn't it make sense to do this work before the snow?
If you zoom in to the left side of the picture, you can see the sloping roof where it fell in. That back area of the store would've been the last few grocery aisles, dairy/frozen, and seafood. One more picture that gives a little bit of a view from the front of the store again...
Owner: Howard Lee / Food World Supermarkets
Opened: 2017
Previous Tenants: Food Fair > Pantry Pride > Foodtown > Food King > A Seabra Foods
Cooperative: Key Food Stores
Location: 550 Raritan Rd, Roselle, NJ
Photographed: June & November 2021
It's not easy to photograph this damage because of where the windows are. By the way, the foliage in the foreground here is not actual leaves, it fell from the fake branches in the produce department. Well, I'll certainly return here if there are any construction updates and when the store reopens, but I really wanted to document the store in its present condition before it was changed. Don't forget to see what else we have today here:
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