Over Before It Started

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #121

Today we’re looking at a strip plaza in Washington, New Jersey, just over the Hunterdon County line in Warren County, not that far from Pennsylvania. This is a building that tells a story about a place.

Here’s the view from the side:

This was an A&P Fresh, a higher-end concept store meant to stave off the chain’s slow decline as newer, nicer supermarkets began to eat their lunch in the mid-to-late 2000s. I took these photos a couple of years ago; the signage is gone now and the old supermarket is a warehouse now. Here’s a YouTube video of what it looks like now.

A few small businesses, including a pretty good pizzeria, somehow managed to hold on. At least some of these were still open when I drove by here recently.

Before the inside was gutted and the windows were papered over, I was able to get these neat photos through the windows:

And here’s the geographic setting of this strip plaza/supermarket; it’s at the big intersection at the bottom-middle of this Google Earth image:

---

This 46,000 square-foot A&P was built in 1996, at a time when the prospect of open space and low prices lured New York supercommuters out here, to a community which is technically part of the Lehigh Valley metropolitan area.

You can see the patchwork of farm fields and subdivisions basically frozen in time—a transitional state that probably would have tilted towards low-density development had the 2008 financial crisis not happened. There are occasional new subdivisions out this way, but so far not enough to turn it into anything other than a rural-exurban final ring.

The A&P closed in 2010 or 2011, as far as I can tell or recall, following the opening of a big new 70,000-square-foot ShopRite. A&P knew that would be the end, and they filed a raft of legal challenges to the ShopRite’s approval and construction, delaying but not preventing its opening. (It’s kind of crazy that such a series of appeals can even be made.)

It’s a pretty short trajectory, really, for this store and the idea of this area as a New York bedroom community: one data point against the impression of continuous loss of farmland to sprawl.

There just were not enough people here to support even two modern supermarkets. And, further up the line, not enough people who wanted this lifestyle. And when you look at the remote location, and the beauty surrounding that blighted half-empty strip plaza, maybe it’s best that way.

---

Related Reading:

Rural New Mexico Blues

There’s a Small Hotel

Main Street Life

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 700 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!