Stop & Shop
Opened: 2003
Welcome to Mission Hill! This store is right on the border of Longwood and Mission Hill, which is south of the Back Bay/Fenway area. This suburban area is between Longwood, the suburb of Brookline to the west, Roxbury to the east, and Jamaica Plain to the south.
This complex was a ground-up build in 2003, but it replaced an older store on the property. It wasn't a Stop & Shop, though. Instead, some searching on Newspapers.com revealed that it opened as an Elm Farms Food Store in April 1955. It looks like it may have been co-branded Elm Farms and Calumet Supermarket -- it appears that Elm Farms may have been a cooperative? -- and by 1978, it seems to have been co-branded Giant Value and Calumet. Calumet was in business until at least 1998.
The store looks to have opened at the tail end of this store model, as you can see the produce department with the rounded ceiling here. It looks like it was renovated around 2015, and has been renovated again since.
This store is an unusual one for sure. It's on the second level of the mall, facing the parking lot in the back. The first exterior picture shows the back of the mall (which is the supermarket's front wall), and the second exterior picture shows the front of the mall. It's pretty small, at just around 30,000 square feet.
The layout and most of the fixtures haven't changed since the store first opened, but it was looking pretty good back in 2019. These days, it has the very boring all-gray decor, but it doesn't look like they replaced fixtures or flooring or much else.
In a fairly typical layout for stores of this era, the grand aisle has produce on one side and prepared foods, deli, and seafood along the left side. Meat and dairy are on the back wall, with frozen foods on the right side and bakery in the front-right corner. There's no pharmacy here.
You can see here that the decor package here is scaled down from how it normally looks, given the lower ceiling.
Here's a creative use of the smaller space, a cheese case extending in front of the packaged prepared foods. Typically, Stop & Shops of this era had a much larger cheese shop.
Stop & Shop was doing a lot of building in the late 90s and early 00s, then not much since. So a lot of their current store base is stores of roughly this era.
There were a couple variations on this decor package. The earliest one can be seen in Chelmsford, with large rectangular panels behind the department signage. In Pompton Plains, you can see that the signage is backlit in front of curved panels with the fruit-slice logo. The final, and cheapest, version had flat panels with the fruit-slice logo but the signage wasn't backlit. This one has a scaled-down version of the Pompton Plains-style decor, but some signs are missing the curved panel, such as the meat sign.
I don't know for sure, but it looks like this is the original flooring of the store. I suspect that it was probably refinished during the ca. 2015 remodel, because that's awfully shiny for 15-year-old flooring.
These signs didn't typically hold up too well, and you can see some small issues here in the fresh from the dairy sign. That's a frequent issue with this decor.
Dairy begins on the back wall and then lines the outside of aisle 14, the last aisle.
I like this signage, though, and if it had been maintained well it wouldn't need to be replaced yet. It's certainly much more appealing than the decor that replaced it here.
Dairy and frozen in the last aisle.
Bakery is in the front corner, and it's a full selection if a smaller department.
And a look across the front-end, back towards the grand aisle. I like the lit checkout lane shelving!
Owner: Ahold Delhaize
Previous Tenants: none; other stores previously on property
Cooperative: none
Location: 1620 Tremont St, Boston, MA
Photographed: June 2, 2019 and July 19, 2019
Well folks, we're not quite done with Boston yet, but we're very close. This is the last store we're seeing within the main part of the city, although the Allston/Brighton area (surrounded on most sides by other cities and only connected to the main city by a thin strip of Boston). We're going to move along to the next suburb outside of Boston up next. Come back tomorrow to see more about what's coming and a look back at what we've seen!
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