Interesting Kroger and A&P stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Andrew T.
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Interesting Kroger and A&P stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana

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This last July, I spent a week in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was there for reasons other than supermarkets, but I still managed to take the time to find a few...
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This attractive, well-maintained A&P Centennial store is on 4135 Hessen Cassel Road. It's still selling groceries as a Mexican supermarket, and it even has a restaurant tucked inside. Too bad I had already had lunch that day...
"The pale pastels which have been featured in most food stores during the past 20 years are no longer in tune with the mood of the 1970s."
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Re: Interesting Kroger and A&P stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana

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This one is located on 2021 Broadway, and was listed in a 1972 directory as a Kroger store. It's also still selling groceries today, and has housed George's International Market since 2001. Just imagine the building without the gigantic colorful sign over the walkway, and you'd probably have the original look.

I stepped inside...and was overcome with a sense of deja vu. This store had the same front-end mezzanine looking out over the checkouts, same clockwise spiral, same service doors in the back corners, as dozens of other Kroger stores I had seen and been in over the years. It had the same "feel" that a superstore or greenhouse store has...although this store was both older and much smaller in size. Kroger must have had essentially one store layout that it upsized and adapted for more than 20 years.
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The front facade is a bit deceptive; the supermarket makes up less than half of the actual frontage, with a dollar store and liquor store bookending it on both ends. At least one of them was probably a SupeRx or some other drugstore at one time.
"The pale pastels which have been featured in most food stores during the past 20 years are no longer in tune with the mood of the 1970s."
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Re: Interesting Kroger and A&P stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Finally, here's yet another Kroger; this time an operational specimen in nearby New Haven at 821 Lincoln Highway West. I was in a hurry and didn't go inside this one, but I suspect it's a renovated superstore: The adjacent shopping-center pillars still have a superstore look, and the walkway is also dotted by ersatz fake-window niches with lights that could have only come from the 1970s. A rectangular superstore-era sign is also visible on the side wall in Bing Maps aerial imagery, but it's gone from the building now. The oblong "Pharmacy" sign looks like it's from the early post-greenhouse era, circa 1990, so perhaps the store was updated then.

Assuming this is a renovation, I'm pleasantly surprised that they went to the effort of matching the original dark-brick color for the updated facade. It looks much nicer than some of the crude and jarring remodelings I've seen, like the "Frankenstein Krogers" I seem to come across again and again...
"The pale pastels which have been featured in most food stores during the past 20 years are no longer in tune with the mood of the 1970s."
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Re: Interesting Kroger and A&P stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Andrew T. wrote:Kroger must have had essentially one store layout that it upsized and adapted for more than 20 years.
I think that's true to some extent. Same for Food Lion too.
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