The Market Report

Original Grocery Tenant:  Hall's Grocery Address: 39 N 7th St, Easton, PA Opened:  1969 Closed:  ca. 2018 Later Tenants:  none Photographed:  January 8, 2021 You'd barely even know this space was home for many decades to a small grocer, now that the store has closed up shop, except for the Pepsi vending machine out front which is a bit odd to just have in front of someone's house. What I didn't realize when I was there is that the store actually had its entrance here in this building but most of the store seems to have been to the side, next door in the area with yellow siding that we can see in this street view when apparently the store was still in business. Sadly, this is all that's left these days, and I couldn't get a good look inside the store. But that wraps up our look at the Lehigh Valley! Tomorrow we're going to see some updates and special reports, and then after that we're off to the Stroudsburg area!

Original Grocery Tenant: A&P Address: 1520 Northampton St, Easton, PA Opened:  1950s (?) Closed:  1983 Later Tenants:  ShopRite (possible?) > Cramer's Home Center (1980s-1998) > CVS (1998- ) Photographed:  January 8, 2021 This 17,000 square foot store was clearly a centennial A&P, but interestingly enough also has an arched roof behind that facade with a small flat section on either side, suggesting it may actually have been an earlier build converted to a centennial in the 1960s. According to JoshAustin610 , it may have later become a ShopRite before a series of non-grocery tenants, most recently CVS. We have one more stop in the Lehigh Valley before we move on, which is a small former grocery store just north of center city Easton that we'll be seeing tomorrow right here on Grocery Archaeology!

Los Compdres Mini Market Owner:  Edward Ovalle Opened:  2013 Cooperative:  none Location:  1649 Washington Ave, Easton, PA Photographed:  January 8, 2021 That's quite the building exterior! This structure was built in the 1950s as a Food Fair, and I would recommend reading JoshAustin610's description of its history here . What he identifies as a former video store is now a small grocery store on the left side of the building, taking up maybe 3,000 square feet of the roughly 12,000 square foot building. It's not hard to tell this building was a grocery store, since it has all of the trademark features but also the beautiful marquee-style feature over what used to be the main entrance (see this example in Trenton for another similar design). The side of the building is clearly an old supermarket, though, between the columns and the bricked-over windows! What appears to be the former Food Fair entrance is now the entrance to Los Compadres Mini Market, a small bode...

Grocery Outlet Owner: Dane & Natalie Sanford Opened:  2018 Previous Tenants:  assorted non-grocery tenants Location:  2541 Nazareth Rd, Easton, PA Photographed:  January 8, 2021 It's time for another Grocery Outlet! We saw one back in Philadelphia , and this promising hard-discount format is quickly growing in the Philadelphia/New Jersey area. The most recent opening in the area was in Hazlet, NJ, just next to the former ALDI we saw when we were down there. (I suppose I shouldn't say the format is promising as it's already been proven successful in this area and elsewhere, instead, it seems to be a successful addition to this area's competitive grocery market.) I visited my first Grocery Outlet ever back in 2015 in Allentown and was rather impressed. Unlike other discount stores that rely primarily on private label products, Grocery Outlet has a mix of storebrand and name brand items, and this 25,000 square foot store is a pleasant example of one of their newer ...

Park Avenue Market Owner: Victor Ricci Opened:  1960s-2021 Cooperative:  none Location:  2468 Park Ave, Easton, PA Photographed:  January 8, 2021 Welcome to Easton, our final stop in our journey through the Lehigh Valley! Easton is the smallest of the three cities that make up most of the Lehigh Valley (the other two being Allentown and Bethlehem), and so we won't spend that much time here in Easton. Our first stop is to the northwest of town, and it was a grocery store from around the 1960s through last year when it appears to have been sold and it's now the Parkk Ave Smoke Outlet & Exotics, which is definitely not what the store was when I visited. The 7600 square foot space, as we can see, appears to have been expanded around an original residential building, and is now very long and thin. When I visited, there were a few long grocery aisles with frozen on the left side, deli and meat on the back wall, and dairy and produce on the right side. Let's head in. W...

Azar Supermarket Owner: George Azar Opened:  2019 Cooperative:  none Location:  3131 Linden St, Bethlehem, PA Photographed:  January 8, 2021 Today's post is relatively brief, but we're going to see this really interesting store which seems to be a hybrid of a farmstand, a Middle Eastern specialty store, and a basic grocer. Oh, and a beautiful garden center . It's a somewhat strange packed into the roughly 16,000 square foot store, but it was a very pleasant shopping experience, and the folks who work here seemed to be quite friendly. We enter to a large produce department taking up around 1/3 of the store in the front left corner, with butcher/deli in the back left corner, frozen/dairy around the outside, and a few grocery aisles with basic groceries and imported Middle Eastern items. It's an eclectic mix of items with exceptionally good produce, so it works. I bought kale here for extremely cheap that was some of the healthiest I've ever seen. Check out those gian...