Putting the "Pacific" in "A&P"

On May 2, 1930, A&P opened nine stores in the greater Los Angeles area, their first units on the West Coast. Seventy years after the company’s founding, the famous name – The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company – became a statement of fact, and of the long-awaited realization of a dream. An article in the previous day’s Los Angeles Times quoted A&P president John Hartford, who had

The Last of the Melting Snow - A&P '67

At last - the snow is all but melted, save for a few somewhat dingy looking piles here and there.Oh, I don’t mean today, when half the country has been covered with record snows. That could go on for weeks yet! I’m referring to the scene above, a 1967 snapshot photo (thanks to Mark) of the A&P supermarket in tiny Millerton, New York. Millerton is some 60 miles northwest of Hartford, very close

The Other Side of Harlem

...Harlem Avenue, that is. The photo above, from a 1976 issue of CTA quarterly, shows a group of people about to catch a southbound West Towns bus as it stopped on Harlem Avenue, directly in front of the North Riverside E.J. Korvette store and across the street from Berwyn’s Cermak Plaza. As mentioned in a series of Korvette posts on this site a while back, as a kid I found this circa-1965

The Art and History of Cermak Plaza

What in the world would ever cause a strip mall to become famous? Thousands of them have been built over the last 60 years. Because of their utilitarian nature and the relative ease of facelifting, remodeling or expanding them, a high percentage of them still stand. Over time, the "lucky ones", if such an analogy makes sense, continue to house "Class A" retailers - well-known