256 Cambridge St, Burlington, MA

Original Grocery Tenant: A&P

Address: 256 Cambridge St, Burlington, MA

Opened: ca. 1960s

Closed: unknown

Later Tenants: assorted non-grocery tenants

Photographed: May 16, 2024

I'm sure everybody here already knows what this store was originally. This store of around 14,000 square feet was built in the early 1960s, apparently opening between 1963 and 1965, although I don't know when it closed. And for those who don't know, this store was originally a location of A&P, once the country's largest supermarket chain, built in a style called Centennial (given that the stores were a special design to celebrate the chain's 100th anniversary in 1959). There are more than a few stores of that model still operating as supermarkets across the country, and some were even still A&P locations right up until the chain's 2015 bankruptcy. This one is a bit unusual because the building is actually more of a parallelogram than a rectangle, as the front and back walls are straight but the side walls are angled. You can really only see that in aerial photos. Today, the building houses the Used Book Superstore, a truly wonderful warehouse of an unbelievable number of used books. (Well, I was impressed, at least.) Unfortunately, I couldn't detect any remnants of A&P inside the bookstore, which might mean there was another tenant between them. There's still a supermarket right up the street from this one, though, and we'll check it out on Monday!