49 Old Route 22, Clinton, NJ

Original Tenant: A&P
Address: 49 Old Route 22, Clinton, NJ

Opened: 1970s

Closed: 2015

Later Tenants: demolished

Photographed: June 2020

The 1970s saw a lot of new construction for A&P, especially in the northwestern NJ area. Just in the past few weeks, we've seen Califon, Belvidere, Andover, the original Vernon store, Budd Lake... you get the picture. Here in Clinton, the earlier 1950s store next door was replaced by this store around the middle of the decade, it seems.

The roughly 30,000 square foot store lasted with its original signage right until the end in 2015 when this store closed without a buyer. In mid-2021, the store was finally demolished for a new redevelopment that includes smaller-scale retail and affordable housing, but I was lucky enough to get the store before it was touched!

There's a lot of great coverage of this store out there already, but I needed my own collection of pictures. For the highlights, check out Acme Style's incredible interior pictures from back in 2012 along with A&P Preservation's coverage from 2018 and earlier that year with pictures from 2015 right after the store closed.

Sadly, I have never been inside this store. But we do have some pretty solid interior pictures through the front windows below. You can also see the barrel roof of the older store next door above.

Looking in through the entrance/exit on the left side of the store. It looks like there'd be a second entrance/exit on the right, but there isn't.

White and green registers, presumably from the Sav-A-Center era. As A&P Preservation and Acme Style point out, this store received lots of secondhand equipment and fixtures from closed stores but was never renovated itself.

Hours sign still hanging in the window right until the end.

Here's the entrance/exit area along with the back of customer service/office, and we can see the freezer cases in the middle of the store. These, as A&P Preservation points out, are newer than the rest of the store and come from the 90s-era Foodmarket style remodels.

The deli would've been just around this corner to the left of the entrance.

Here's a pretty good, if too bright, shot of the interior. This interior is in impressively good shape for a store that closed five years ago when these pictures were taken.

Here's the back of customer service/registers. Or would this have been the front of the customer service counter?

And the registers to the right of that...

Unfortunately we can't really see into the right corner of the store from this angle.

Looks like this would've been the store manager's office, maybe, or possibly a technical room (electric or something).

The building backs up to the property's edge on the right side and back, so the loading docks and everything face the front parking lot rather than the back...

This is the left side of the store building.

Looking over from the newer store's parking lot to the old barrel roof store, whose roofline you can clearly see here.

And of course we need to see the classic sign out on Old Route 22, which was reversed on one side (this side) so that the red portion with the name was still centered on the off-center post.

Tomorrow, we head east on 22 to Readington Township for a look at two stores out there, one on The Market Report and one on The Independent Edition!