The Market Report

Now it's time for all the former grocery stores in and around downtown Worcester, and nearly all are on Main Street or a block or two away. In the central downtown area, so many of the buildings are new that none of the original grocery stores are left. To the north and south a few blocks, though, there's a lot to see. 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 ...

Now it's time to check out the independent stores in downtown Worcester! (Admittedly, several of the first stores here might be more accurately classified as northern Main South, but in my completely unscientific division of the city, Main South ends at May Street and anything on Main north of May is downtown.) 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 ...

Original Grocery Tenant: Worcester Market Address: 627 Main St, Downtown, Worcester, MA Opened:  before 1916 Closed:  ca. 1930s Later Tenants:  Brockelman Brothers Worcester Market (open by 1937, closed by 1957) > Stop & Shop (open by 1957, closed by 1969) Photographed:  November 4, 2018 and April 1, 2022 Right in the middle of downtown Worcester is the 25,000 square foot (per floor) Worcester Market building. It's a huge, hulking, and actually very beautiful building that was home to a very early market dating back to 1914 when the building was built. Originally called the Worcester Market (which you can see in the inscription on the top of the building), it was eventually rolled into the Brockelman Brothers chain, which had other stores on Front Street just off the common and at Lincoln Square. What's interesting about this building, though, is that it actually remained a supermarket well into the 1960s -- Stop & Shop acquired the space by 1957, then c...

Gala Foods Supermarket Opened: 2018 Owner:  Aurora Grocery Group Previous Tenants:  department store > Santiago's Supermarket > Compare Foods Cooperative:  Key Food Stores Location:  664 Main St, Downtown, Worcester, MA Photographed:  October 9, 2018; November 18, 2018; April 14, 2019; and October 18, 2020 We're coming back to Worcester's Gala Foods (previously Compare Foods ) in downtown Worcester to see the final stages of the conversion fully finished. Long ago, of course -- Aurora Grocery Group converted their New York and New England Compare Foods stores to Gala Foods back in 2018, when they joined Key Food but couldn't keep their name . (I find it absolutely hilarious that Gala Foods' new slogan is "Beyond Comparison," a joke not that many people will get.) The 27,000 square foot building was originally a department store, which in 1965 was The Mart . I believe it became Santiago's Market around 2000 (incidentally, my former boss's fa...

Mekong Market Opened:  ca. 2005 in current location Owner:  Anh Truong Previous Tenants:  none Cooperative:  none Location:  747 Main St, Downtown, Worcester, MA Photographed:  August 26, 2018 and December 8, 2018 Ha Tien Market , down a few blocks south on Main Street, is one of the two larger Vietnamese grocery stores in Worcester. The other is here at the northern edge of Main South where it borders the southern edge of downtown, and Mekong Market isn't actually all that old. It was built from the ground up sometime around 2005, replacing an older store closer to the street on the same property that had been there for a while, but actually itself replaced an older store at 705 Main. You enter on the right side of the store, then turn left to enter the produce department which runs along the front wall. The rest of the grocery aisles run front-to-back in a pretty standard setup, with meat and seafood on the back wall. Frozen and refrigerated foods are on...

  Continuing our trek northeast through Worcester! We came in through the southwest via Webster Square and Main South, and now it's on to Downtown just above Main South along Main Street. There aren't a lot of grocery stores downtown, but downtown Worcester has become a hot area with a lot of development and redevelopment. The Worcester Common is in the middle of the city, bounded by Main Street and City Hall, Front Street at the north, Franklin Street at the south, and Church Street at the east. (The Common most recently made an appearance in The Holdovers , masquerading as Boston Common. More movies than you'd think have been filmed in Worcester.) Within a few blocks of there, most of the city's main buildings are situated -- Union Station and the Central Hub (bus terminal), hospital, library, theater, main post office, and so on and so forth. I spent a lot of time in downtown Worcester, although I got to know the outer neighborhoods really well too. Unfortunately, t...