Zayre in Miami

Here are some nice circa-1970 photos featuring the Zayre and Grand Union stores that were located the corner of Dixie Highway (U.S. 1) and 136th Street in Pinecrest (Miami-Dade County), Florida. These photos and much of the background information that follows comes to us through the courtesy of Stuart Spector of Spector and Sons, a well-known general contracting firm that has built many significant buildings in the Miami area since 1925. Thanks, Stuart!

The store has a different appearance from the standard “Zayre look” of the time for a good reason – it was originally built in the very early 1960’s as a Consumers Mart of America (CMA) store, a membership store that operated along the lines of a Gemco or Fed-Mart back in the day, or a modern Costco or Sam’s Club. One of the most interesting aspects of the short-lived CMA chain was the fact that George Raft, the famous actor known for his gangster roles in Warner Bros. movies of the 1930’s and 40’s was CMA’s vice president of advertising and public relations. Raft was present at each new store opening, sometimes dragging his Hollywood buddies (for example, Jerry Lewis at the 1961 Torrance, California store opening) along.

When CMA went bankrupt in 1965, Zayre took over a number of their store locations, including three in Chicago (as previously mentioned) and three in Florida - South Dade County (the location pictured), north Dade County and Tampa. Spector and Sons, who had built all three Florida locations, took over the mortgages when CMA went bankrupt. They sold the North Dade and Tampa properties and still own the South Dade location.

Also of note is the Grand Union supermarket, which as can be seen underwent a slight facelifting between the time these photos were taken. Grand Union, a New Jersey-based chain, entered the Florida market in the mid-50’s and had 48 supermarkets (and 8 Grand Way stores, a Zayre competitor) there by 1968.

And check out the gas prices at the Zayre auto center!

After Zayre moved out, the building was damaged by Hurricane Andrew in the early 90’s and was later redeveloped by Spector and Sons as a Builders Square. It is now a Home Depot, and the former Zayre auto center is now a Bank of America branch.

Pat Richardson of the Charlotte Eats website, an excellent photo history of Charlotte NC area restaurants, sent me this link to a nice close-up photo of the Zayre store’s entrance from a bit earlier.

Twilight of the Grand Union

The two photographs above show The Grand Union Company’s office tower and flagship store on the very last day of the store’s operation in March 2001. These photos come to us courtesy of John, an Elmwood Park native, who worked at the store during the last 14 years of its existence. The tower and flagship store were featured prominently in a series of posts on Grand Union’s early and mid-period history that appeared on this site late last year.

Opened as part of Elmwood Park (known as East Paterson until 1973) , New Jersey’s Elmwood Shopping Center in 1951, the structure was unique in that it combined a corporate headquarters with a full-blown retail supermarket on the first floor. The store served as a proving ground for the innovative chain and was a source of immense pride for Grand Union. The facility received a number of accolades and awards from the architectural community and soon came to be regarded as a local landmark.

In 1987, Grand Union moved its headquarters to nearby Wayne, New Jersey, while the store was left in place. As the photos sadly attest, the building deteriorated from that point on, hence the many boarded up windows. In 2001, after a seeming multitude of ownership changes, acquisitions, bankruptcies and other traumatic events, the chain finally threw in the towel. The Grand Union name lives on in a handful of stores that aren’t formally connected with the original organization.

The Elmwood Park Grand Union, along with its famous tower, was torn down later that year. A Walgreens now sits on the site, and the rest of the shopping center now has uniform storefronts.

John’s reflections appear below.

“I've lived in Elmwood Park my whole life so the Elmwood Shopping Center was a huge part of my life growing up. My mother used to walk up there with my sisters and I when we were little so I have great memories of all the stores with those great neon signs. The signs today are so boring compared to them. Another thing is that years ago all the store fronts looked different from each other, which had a lot of charm, and that's changed within recent years. The town wanted all the store fronts to look the same. I remember all these great stores like Kress which later changed to McCrory's, Channel which was a hardware store, Loft's (a candy/ice cream store), Molk Brothers (a greeting card/jewelry store), a men's store called Mr. L, a womens store called Lobell's, the Walgreens of course, and I vaguely remember the Neisner's and another store called Shirlaine's or Shirlene's, and of course the Grand Way which you know is now a Big Kmart”.

“I never thought they would actually tear down the Grand Union tower and when I was working there we were always told that they couldn't because it was a landmark. So much for that. The sad thing is that when G.U. moved their headquarters from Elmwood Park to Wayne, the tower remained empty and fell into serious disrepair. There were broken windows all over it. The other really sad thing is that while years ago that was their flagship store, when they moved no one cared about that store anymore. What was once their flagship store went downhill fast. Hours were cut, employees disgruntled, and customers very unhappy. Still I look back at my time there as the best years of my life”.

Note: Please click here then scroll down for earlier photos of the Grand Union Elmwood Park location.

Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmastime 1966, and here’s one more look at the Grand Union complex in East Paterson, New Jersey’s Elmwood Shopping Center. A cold night, to be sure, but the spirit of Christmas in the air and the glow of neon help to warm things up. The Grand Way store is in place now, welcoming shoppers for its first Christmas season. A tall, elegant Christmas tree stands near the store’s entrance.

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has visited this site since I launched it back in July. Whether you stop in once in a while to see what’s new, just found it by chance, or make it a regular part of your surfing day, it’s greatly appreciated. I especially want to thank those who’ve commented, and those who have sent me such kind emails, full of wonderful memories of your own. I’m overwhelmed by them, and it definitely makes the time and effort worthwhile.

Like many of you, I will be traveling over the coming week, so this is likely the last post until the New Year. May the True Joy of Christmas be yours, may your holidays be great and spent with family and friends, and may you each have a wonderful and healthy New Year!

Dave

Elmwood Shopping Center, 1952

Here’s an aerial view, from 1952, of the Elmwood Shopping Center - home of Grand Union’ s headquarters and flagship store. The second largest retail tenant in the center was Neisner’s, a major variety store chain at the time, and probably the only one who didn’t have a set of initials before its name, unlike its competitors – F.W. Woolworth, W.T. Grant, S.S. Kresge, J.J. Newberry, G.C. Murphy…

The parking lot to the left of the shopping center at the edge of the photo would become the future location of the Grand Way store which opened, as previously mentioned, in 1966.

On Their Toes at the Grand Union

Without a doubt, the employees of this particular Grand Union were “on their toes” on a regular basis, due in no small measure to the fact that Grand Union’s corporate honchos held court directly above their store. The photos above, from 1952, show the company’s brand-spanking new corporate offices which opened in November 1951 (the store opened the following April) in the Elmwood Shopping Center at 180 Broadway in East Paterson, New Jersey.

In 1950, Grand Union announced their intention to vacate their longtime offices at 50 Church Street in Manhattan and move to Bergen County, NJ, a bustling, densely populated suburban area located across the river from New York. Many American companies from the 50’s through the 70’s forsook their downtown offices (A&P would finally move from their NYC offices to Montvale, NJ nearly 25 years later) for sprawling, beautifully landscaped suburban campuses, but a shopping center? This was something else again, and it garnered Grand Union a fair amount of favorable publicity in such publications as the New York Herald-Tribune, Fortune, Time and Architectural Forum, from which the above photos were taken. In both perception and reality, the move allowed Grand Union to “get close” to their customers.

The Grand Union store at this location was understandably used as a proving ground for the chain, and one of the obvious manifestations of this was in the area of store layout, as clearly shown in the store’s “planogram” (to use a modern-day term) shown in the last photo. The Elmwood store layout was aptly likened in a June 1955 Fortune magazine article to a wagon wheel, with “numerous aisles that fan out as do the spokes of a wheel”. A striking departure from standard supermarket aisle design, this unconventional design was championed by Grand Union president Lansing Shield (lionized in previous posts) with a view toward using it in more of the chain’s stores.

It’s interesting to ponder why this unique layout ultimately failed to win favor over the age-old parallel aisle design that still predominates in the supermarket business. Perhaps customers were consistently confused by the layout or over time found it tiresome. Maybe older shoppers had difficulty navigating the different departments. I’m fairly certain that cost played a part, with extra travel time required to restock the shelves. Another probable factor would have been the need to maximize shelf space as the number of items the average grocery store stocked absolutely skyrocketed in the late 50’s and throughout the 60’s.

In the summer of 1956, the flagship store was damaged by fire, forcing it to close for three months. A temporary store was set up in a circus-style tent on the parking lot. A slightly expanded version of the store reopened, with the glassed-in vestibule extended toward the direction of the parking lot. In 1966, a two-story, 100,000 square foot Grand Way department store was built at the opposite end of the shopping center.

On a recent business trip to New Jersey, I decided one evening to swing by the ol’ Elmwood in hopes of taking a close look at the store and HQ, curious to see who now inhabited it. To my surprise, the shopping center was still there, but the Grand Union headquarters building and store were completely gone! The headquarters portion was torn down and replaced with single story stores and a standard-issue Walgreens now stands where the GU store was in the foreground of the first photo. Time most certainly does march on. The Grand Way store is fairly intact from an exterior standpoint and is now a (Big)Kmart.

And by the way, if you look for East Paterson, New Jersey on a current map, you won’t find it. In 1973, the town’s name was changed to Elmwood Park.

Grand Union, Independent Innovator

Grand Union held its own through the Depression years and made slow but steady progress through World War II. By the war’s end, however, the company faced a new challenge, perhaps less from external forces than from a growing friction between company president J. Spencer Weed and Lansing P. Shield, vice-president and number two man in the company. Weed was extremely conservative in his approach, and was dead-set against joining the industry trends toward building larger, suburban stores and self-service. Over the years, Shield would emerge as Weed’s polar opposite, full of energy and ideas for transforming and expanding the (then fairly young) supermarket concept and eager to push Grand Union out onto the industry’s leading edge.

The relationship between Weed and Shield (I know, together the names sound like a lawn care product, don’t they?) reached a final breach in mid-1946 when Weed entered into negotiations with the American Stores Company (parent of Acme Markets) to sell Grand Union out. American was multiples larger than Grand Union, with 1,964 stores at the end of 1945 vs. Grand Union’s 320 stores. The merger deal was officially announced in the New York Times on October 8, 1946.

Aghast at the prospect of having spent 22 years in building up Grand Union only to hand its future over to another firm, Shield vigorously opposed the merger. Ultimately, enough key stockholders and directors agreed with Shield that the deal was called off, as announced in the Times on November 5th. Weed stepped down from Grand Union’s presidency immediately, and within a year would retire from the board of directors as well, leaving Shield in full control of the company.

Shield moved quickly to convert the Grand Union stores to self-service and to ramp up the company’s building program. In the next ten years, he would spearhead the development of new concepts in store layout, breaking away from the traditional “aisle format” into a sort of departmentalized “island” concept. Grand Union was also an early leader in the use of color in their stores, carefully selecting hues for each area to maximize sales appeal.

Not only was Shield a grocery industry innovator, he was an inventor as well. The Food-O-Mat, as Fortune magazine called it, was Shield’s “personal, patented invention”, and was first used to handle canned goods. The key feature of the Food-O-Mat was its gravity fed design, with shelves that sloped downward toward the customer aisle, while stockers would replenish cans from a hidden back aisle, behind the wall. One advantage of this design was that restocking could take place during a regular shift as opposed to overnight, or to getting in the way of customers while they shopped. The Food-O-Mat became so successful that it was soon adapted for a number of other uses, including cosmetics. Grand Union eventually set up a subsidiary to manufacture and market the Food-O-Mat to other chains (both food and non-food), including Macy’s, Kroger and even direct competitors like spurned suitor Acme, among many others.

The first photo is of the Glens Falls, NY store exterior from 1947. The second, from the same year, shows the Food-O-Mat in the Monroe, NY store. The third and fourth photos show a wider store view and a close up of the “Meateria” (definitely my nominee for scariest department name ever) from unidentified stores in 1948 and 1949. Just for fun, in a tip of the hat to Grand Union’s Route Division, the last photo shows a route truck and salesman’s car from the Syracuse, NY branch in 1947.

Tales of the Grand Union

A familiar face to grocery shoppers throughout the Northeast states (and even more so to those Northeasterners who vacationed in Florida), the late, great Grand Union Company also held the distinction of being one of America’s oldest grocery chains, second only to The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

The company was founded in Scranton, PA in 1872 (thirteen years after A&P) by Cyrus D. Jones, who would soon be joined by his two brothers to form the Jones Brothers Tea Company, the predecessor to Grand Union. To augment the sales of their lone store, Jones initiated home delivery service to customers in the area, planting the seeds of what would become Grand Union’s “Route Division”, an operation that would continue into the 1950’s. The “Grand Union” name was adopted in the last years of the 19th century for a subsidiary of Jones called the Grand Union Tea Company.

The chain had grown to 200 stores and 500 horse-and-buggy equipped route salesmen by its 40th anniversary in 1912. The corporate offices were set up in New York. By the early 20’s, however, things began to falter, with falling profits on an unwieldy assortment of stores, routes and unnecessary manufacturing operations.

Help was on the way in the form of two former A&P managers recruited in 1924 – J. Spencer Weed as President and 28-year old whiz kid Lansing P. Shield as Controller. Within four years, the team had streamlined the company, sold off the non-core (as we refer to it in current business-speak) manufacturing plants, and led the company back to profitability. In 1928, the Jones family sold out their ownership stake and the entire company was officially rechartered as the Grand Union Tea Company.

The photos above (featuring the fabulous "Food-O-Mat", an L.P. Shield invention) are from 1946.