The Market Report

This approximately 6300 square foot former Social Security office was converted to a Fine Fare in 2008 by owner Carlos Collado. While it's a very small store, it's a nicely outfitted and attractively merchandised example of an urban supermarket. While this store is about half the size of yesterday's Pioneer , and only about two blocks north, it's clearly a better managed store -- better stocked, better organized, and cleaner. With produce in the front corner, the first aisle is lined with dairy products. Meats and deli run along the back wall with frozen in the last aisle. It's not a large store, but certainly complete and well-used. Six grocery aisles, three registers plus customer service. This store is located at 3315 White Plains Road. Photographed March 2019

In 2009, a brand-new Pioneer Supermarket opened on the ground floor of a newly built mixed use complex at 3035 White Plains Road. It replaced a much older -- but also much larger -- Pioneer immediately next door  that appears to have been owned by Leonard Franzblau. I believe the new store is owned by Neftali Medina, though I can no longer find the record that led me to that conclusion. Medina owned the Fresh Imperium locations in Landing and Jefferson , along with other assorted stores. The store is simultaneously nice and kind of depressing. It's pretty up-to-date, but also disorganized and, in many places, irregularly stocked (such as these empty compartments of the produce case). Produce lines the first aisle, with deli at the back. Meat lines the back wall with frozen in the second-to-last aisle and dairy in the last aisle. Some pretty sparse meat shelves around here. In this closeup of the meat department sign (by the way, I do like the decor in this stor...

Our next group of stores in the Bronx is along White Plains Road! We start at the southern part of the neighborhood of Allerton, following White Plains Road (a major through street) through Williamsbridge , Olinville, and Wakefield, seeing eight stores along that stretch. White Plains Road, by the way, starts at the far south end of Soundview , extending past the Bronx Botanical Garden, becoming 1st Street when it crosses into Mount Vernon , then finally petering out and ending just north of the former Western Beef in Mount Vernon . We're only traveling along a small fraction of the street's length, but we'll be starting tomorrow with a snapshot on The Independent Edition !

Jumping from Worcester, MA, to the Bronx, NYC is quite a geographic distance. How much of a running start would you need to jump 160 miles? Plus, there's the pesky matter of where you're going to land. If you're jumping to the Bronx, chances are you'll either end up on someone's roof or in the middle of a busy street. But I digress. We're here in Williamsbridge, in the northeastern Bronx, to visit a brand-new, newly-built Cherry Valley Marketplace which was originally slated to be a Fine Fare. (There is already a Fine Fare at 320 E Gun Hill Rd, just west of this location.) This is one of the few newly-built supermarkets in the Bronx, some other recent examples being the Food Bazaar on 163rd St and the Fine Fare on 149th St, both in 2016. While the South Bronx is arguably gentrifying, Williamsbridge, a lower-key mostly residential neighborhood now a center for West Indian and Caribbean immigrants, is definitely not. But it still has a brand-new Cherry Val...