The Waban Market
Right off the bat, you can tell these pictures weren't from the summer of 2019! Sure, you can point to the better picture quality or the fact that, if you go into the file's metadata, you can see it was taken with a cell phone that quite literally didn't exist in 2019. But most obvious -- here we're seeing the Waban Market with a light coating of snow, which certainly wasn't happening in the summer of 2019 when I visited other stores nearby.
The Waban Market dates back to the 1950s, when it was constructed in the village of Waban within the town of Newton. The store is small but has been expanded over time, growing from its original size of just 2000 square feet to its present 7000 square feet.
I've mentioned that there's an Eastern European community here in some of the suburbs west of Boston, and we've even seen European stores in Brookline and Newton. Here in Waban, the Waban Market serves as somewhat of a hybrid between a specialty market selling Eastern European items and the everyday grocery and liquor store for the neighborhood. There's no other grocery store in Waban, though it's not far to other supermarkets.
You enter the store on the left side with the bakery, deli, and meat departments lining the left-side wall. (Get their fresh chocolate cake and thank me later.) Produce faces that in refrigerators lining the first aisle, frozen foods line the back wall of the store, and dairy is in the back-right corner. A liquor department is in the front-right corner, with the registers on the front wall. It's one part Eastern European specialty market, one part liquor store and neighborhood convenience store, and one part supermarket.
The meat department is small, to the right of the deli department in the blue refrigerator you can see in the pictures above and below. But the deli, as you can see above, is quite large.
It also looks like the store has been recently renovated, with new shelving, some new fixtures, new flooring, and a new paint job. Here's a look at the first aisle before the renovation.
The first grocery aisle is imported Russian and European foods on one side with nonfoods on the other. It looks like they added a row of grocery shelving between the deli and the grocery aisles, and moved produce from a few lower islands to one upright refrigerator case.
The Waban Market sells Best Yet items from C&S.
The last aisle is home to dairy and the liquor department. One unfortunate change in the renovation is that the nice wooden wine shelving was removed in favor of this more standard metal shelving, but overall, the store looks really good. You can also see they keep it up very well.
They also added a half-aisle in the front of this last aisle, with snacks and chips -- more convenience store items than supermarket items -- opposite the beverage refrigerators.
And a look across the front of the store, where the registers are lined up in a counter on the front wall. I wouldn't be surprised if originally there were multiple conveyor belt registers here -- back when this was more the typical size of a supermarket and less a small neighborhood grocer.
And looking in the other direction across the front towards wine/beer from the entrance...
Opened: 1986 under current ownership; ca. 1950s previously
Owner: Yan Kaganov
Previous Tenants: unknown
Cooperative: none
Location: 10 Windsor Rd, Waban, MA
Photographed: January 12, 2025
It's nice to see a longtime neighborhood grocer like this getting updates, and also that it really seems to be used as a grocery store, not just a last-minute convenience stop. From here, we're headed tomorrow out to the northwestern corner of Newton, where we'll see a big-chain supermarket that's been open for about as long as this one has!
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