The Market Report

Now that we've toured all of the larger stores of Dorchester -- and taken a look at some former supermarkets , too -- it's time to check out some of the small independent stores around the neighborhood! A big caveat here: this is nowhere near a look at every independent grocery store and corner store in Dorchester, but it should give us a good overview. Ashmont Phú Thinh Market Opened:  ca. 2013 Owner:  unknown Previous Tenants:  Economy Food Stores (1930s) Cooperative:  none Location:  1826 Dorchester Ave, Dorchester, MA Photographed:  July 27, 2019 We start in Ashmont, in southern Dorchester, for Phú Thinh Market, a small Vietnamese grocery store. It opened around 2013, and previously, the Viet-Huong Market occupied part of the space (as you can see above, the store is two storefronts combined, and they've since been painted the same color). I don't know what was here before Viet-Huong, but way back in the 1930s, a location of the local chain Economy Foo...

Stop & Shop Opened: 2001 Owner:  Ahold Delhaize Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  460 Blue Hill Ave, Dorchester, MA Photographed:  June 2, 2019 I moved to Boston for work in the summer of 2019, which is when I took most of these pictures. But I had family who lived just outside the city, so back in 2014, I came to Boston to visit them -- and I distinctly remember visiting this Stop & Shop. It was quite nice at the time, and it was still nice if aging by the time I visited in 2019. It's the largest supermarket in the area, although at just 43,000 square feet it's on the smaller side for Stop & Shop stores of this era. It opened in late 2001, and although I had originally assumed it was a replacement for the older Stop & Shop store just around the corner , it turns out that store actually closed at least 14 years before this one opened. The supermarket was part of a redevelopment plan for the lower-income area of Grove Hall, ri...

Original Grocery Tenant: Stop & Shop Address: 90 Washington St, Dorchester, MA Opened:  late 1950s Closed:  by 1987 Later Tenants:  BD's Discounts Photographed:  June 2, 2019 and November 13, 2021 In my native land of New Jersey, see an arched-roof store with a glass front wall and it's probably a former Penn Fruit or marina-style Safeway . But Massachusetts had similar stores too -- constructed in only a handful of locations in the 1950s by Stop & Shop. One is still functioning as a supermarket, at Webster Square in Worcester which you can tour here . But here at Grove Hall in Dorchester, this roughly 13,000 square foot arched-roof store is now a discount store called BD's Discounts. The building opened as a Stop & Shop in the late 1950s (between 1955 and 1960). The area you can see to the right looks like it could've been an expansion, but it actually seems like that was part of the store's original footprint -- possibly smaller stores next to the s...

Brother's Supermarket Opened: before 2007 Owner:  Ambiris Fernandez Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  46 Washington St, Dorchester, MA Photographed:  June 2, 2019 and November 13, 2021 The last location of Brother's Supermarket also happens to be the first to open -- roughly some time in the early 2000s, I believe, but I can't pin down an opening more specific than that. Around 2008, they opened a second location at Upham's Corner , then a third in Randolph (a suburb) in 2017 which later that year they sold to America's Food Basket, then a fourth at Fields Corner in 2020, and a fifth in Roslindale in 2023. Unfortunately, I don't know much about this particular location's history other than that the building was before 1938 and that it wasn't a chain grocery store prior to Brother's. All of the Brother's locations are quite small, but this one is the smallest at just 2700 square feet. I would bet that the entrance door f...