Original Grocery Tenant: Stop & Shop
Address: 50 Mill St, Webster Square, Worcester, MA
Two posts in one today! This small strip mall at Webster Square, the Mill Street Plaza, is at Mill and Park and was constructed with a Stop & Shop anchor in the 1950s. That distinctive arched-roof prototype was only used on a few stores, including one in the Dorchester section of Boston. There's another one somewhere in Western Mass -- I think in a Springfield suburb -- that's still standing, but for the life of me I can't remember where. Does anyone have ideas?
Although it's hidden behind the newer facade, the arched-roof store is still there. And actually, the Telegram & Gazette has a picture from just before Stop & Shop opened in their archives!
Here we can see up and under the new facade towards the original facade of the building. Part of the Stop & Shop became a Savers thrift store and then more recently an Asian supermarket, which we'll be seeing tomorrow, but the other part became a buffet which has since closed. When the buffet closed, we actually got a great view of the inside while the space briefly remained vacant...
Obviously this is only part of the original Stop & Shop building, which is around 15,000 square feet but later doubled in size, but we can see the beans and the exposed arched roof, which is very cool!
To the left is the dividing wall between the former buffet space and the current Asian Supermarket space. But we can actually see something fascinating on the back wall...
Somehow, the remnants of a dairy sign remain on the back wall! Now, I'm not positive that this dates back to the Stop & Shop days, although it's certainly possible. I'm also not positive just how this would've looked when a supermarket was here (is that the color of the sign and the wall? Was the lettering removed, revealing the original wall color under it? Or something else?).
One thing I haven't mentioned yet: once Stop & Shop closed, a Save-A-Lot moved in to part of the strip mall, although not the former Stop & Shop space. In the first picture, the Save-A-Lot took up around 15,000 square feet where the Harbor Freight Tools is now. While the picture is terrible quality, you can see the red, yellow, and orange of the old Save-A-Lot logo in this 2007 street view. The Save-A-Lot closed between then and 2011, when Harbor Freight was open, but to this day a remnant sits in the parking lot...
Address: 50 Mill St, Webster Square, Worcester, MA
Opened: between 1952 and 1957
Closed: between 1985 and 1991
Later Tenants: subdivided / Save-A-Lot next door (open in 2007, closed by 2011)
Photographed: April 12, 2019; May 13, 2022; and October 22, 2022
The cart corral outside Harbor Freight Tools still has a Save-A-Lot sign on it! (I've been in the Harbor Freight Tools, admittedly only once, but I didn't detect any signs of the former supermarket inside.) And before we leave this strip mall, we have to check out the remaining supermarket! That'll be our tour tomorrow.
Looking at that wall that divides the old buffet from the market, it seems that perhaps there was a low ceiling in there (since only the lower section of the wall is "finished" off?
ReplyDeleteCarrying that line around the back would run just below the section with the dairy wording (if I am looking correctly), so it seems possible that that was simply covered up for many years, explaining how it still exists (and perhaps that was the only such "department" in that section of the wall?).
That's true, you're probably right -- and it makes sense, too, that a restaurant would have a lower ceiling than a supermarket.
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