The Market Report

Now it's on to the former grocery stores of Main Middle, Tatnuck, Newton Square, and the other neighborhoods around this area! We'll wander through some of the neighborhoods but spend a lot of time around Tatnuck Square on Pleasant Street, around Billings Square, and a bit in Main Middle -- although I have not photographed the multitudes of former grocers along Pleasant Street in Main Middle and a few other hotspots. So remember, this is not nearly a full listing. A note on historical sources:  To get past stores in each location, I've consulted Worcester city directories going back to the 1910s. Here in the city, I'm drawing from  1916, 1922, 1927, 1931, 1937, 1943, 1959, 1952, 1957, 1962, 1969, 1973, 1979, 1985, 1991, 2000, 2009, and 2017.  Also of note: this is far from an exhaustive listing of all grocery stores that have been in this area, although I'll probably eventually post the full thing, this is just what I've been able to photograph. Reading the cap...

Happy Monday! Let's check out the small independent grocers across the neighborhoods we've been visiting. A note on historical sources:  To get "past stores" in each location, I've consulted Worcester city directories going back to the 1910s. Here in the city, I'm drawing from  1916, 1922, 1927, 1931, 1937, 1943, 1959, 1952, 1957, 1962, 1969, 1973, 1979, 1985, 1991, 2000, 2009, and 2017.  Also of note: this is far from an exhaustive listing of all grocery stores that have been in this area, although I'll probably eventually post the full thing, this is just what I've been able to photograph. Reading the captions:  A caption such as the following...          |  John Smith (1926-1937) > Joe Jones (1955-1982) ...means that John Smith appears in the directories in 1926 and 1937, and Joe Jones appears in all directories I consulted between 1955 and 1982. That doesn't mean that John Smith opened up shop in 1926 and closed in 1937, he might ...

Price Chopper Opened: ca. late 1990s Owner:  Northeast Grocery Previous Tenants:  McCracken Markets > Iandoli Super Markets Cooperative:  none Location:  223 Park Ave, Main Middle, Worcester, MA Photographed:  November 4, 2018; January 25, 2019; September 15, 2019; and September 3, 2021 It's time for our fourth (and final) Worcester Price Chopper! (See the Worcester Fair , Sunderland , and Main & Cambridge locations.) We're at the corner of Park and Highland, a few blocks from Worcester Polytechnic Institute's campus, just north of Elm Park and east of a large high school. This store is rather small for a Price Chopper, at just 36,000 square feet. It also appears that the supermarket originally here, a McCracken Markets built around 1960, was much smaller at only about 18,000 square feet. I don't know much about McCracken, the original supermarket here, other than that they were bought by  Iandoli in 1968 . Worcester's 1969 city directory still lis...

Bahnan's Market Opened: 2011 Owner:  Henry Bahnan Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  344 Pleasant St, Main Middle, Worcester, MA Photographed:  November 18, 2018 and February 19, 2022 Bahnan's Market in Worcester's Main Middle neighborhood doesn't commit to a single country. The store represents the Mediterranean and the Middle East, broadly speaking. On their website , you can translate to Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, and Persian. And yes, Worcester does have communities of each of those, especially here in Main Middle. Bahnan's is around 4600 square feet, and is a bit more of a full grocery store than Ed Hyder's a block and a half away. The aisles run side to side, with produce and frozen on the front wall; dairy, meat/deli, cheese, and bakery on the back wall; and a cafe on the left side of the store. The registers are on the right side. The cafe serves up famous Middle Eastern cuisine like shawarma and falafel. And the grocery a...

Ed Hyder's Mediterranean Marketplace Opened:  ca. 2000 Owner:  Ed Hyder Previous Tenants:  unknown Cooperative:  none Location:  408 Pleasant St, Main Middle, Worcester, MA Photographed:  November 18, 2018 and September 3, 2021 Ed Hyder's is a must-visit if Mediterranean food gets you excited. To be clear, we're more on the Greece than Spain side of the Mediterranean here, but there's a little bit to choose from representing all the parts. And the store is in a really beautiful brick building. To my surprise, it doesn't look like this is a longtime grocery store; I don't have any grocers listed for this address before Ed Hyder's opening around 2000. (409 Pleasant, long since demolished, was a John T. Connor & Company location and then a Finast.) The 3500 square foot store consists primarily of a deli/butcher along the right side of the store, a wine shop on the left side, and a few aisles of grocery in the middle. It's definitely not a supermarket, a...

Original Grocery Tenant: Finast Address: 505 Pleasant St, Main Middle, Worcester, MA Opened:  bet. 1937 and 1943 Closed:  bet. 1949 and 1952 Later Tenants:  Economy Food Stores (opened bet. 1952 and 1957, closed 1985 and 1991) Photographed:  February 10, 2019 Happy October! In this part of the city, Park Avenue separates the more suburban Tatnuck/Newton Square/Columbus Park areas to the northwest from the more urban Main Middle and Main South neighborhoods to the southeast. Right at the corner of Pleasant and Park is this 6,000 square foot building, today housing a program of local nonprofit Seven Hills Foundation but originally built around 1940 as a Finast. By 1957, it had become Economy Food Stores, which made it all the way to the late 1980s. (I'm not clear if this was related to the earlier chain called Worcester Economy Stores.) It was also once the headquarters of the Iandolis' Honey Farms chain. Pleasant Street has several small grocers along it (including...

Pleasant Market Opened: 1993 under current ownership Owner:  George Makos Previous Tenants:  The Lenox Market Cooperative:  none Location:  2 Richmond Ave, Newton Square, Worcester, MA Photographed:  March 20, 2021 and May 13, 2022 Welcome to one of the most pleasant, green, and residential neighborhoods of Worcester. The Tatnuck/Newton Square area -- basically everything from Worcester State's campus at the south to Assumption University's campus to the north -- is possibly the most suburban part of the city, and one of the higher-income sections. So there are a lot of beautiful old houses, trees, and winding small streets. At the corner of Richmond and Pleasant, the Pleasant Market has been selling groceries to customers for over a century. The earliest listing I have for this grocery store -- which I estimate is around 800 square feet -- is as The Lenox Market in 1916. The building was constructed in 1910, so I'd bet The Lenox Market opened around that time....