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A Few Words about Eckerd Pharmacy

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Do you remember Eckerd? It's okay, I don't really remember it much either. Even if you have a really sharp memory, I find it's hard for us to remember the more mundane brands and buildings that have dropped out of our lives. After all, how many great memories and stories do you have from a pharmacy, compared to, say, a movie theater ?      Eckerd was one such pharmacy that seems to evade my memory, despite the fact that I grew up down the road from one. For years, we would pop in for prescriptions and assorted bathroom and medical supplies, and I even remember having an extra-large tub of Eckerd Petroleum Jelly, which lasted many years longer than the company itself did. Despite its history as one of the country's largest chain pharmacies, it seems that Eckerd has become nothing more than a faint memory of a logo in my mind. So imagine my surprise when I saw that exact logo in Burlington, NJ, a full seventeen years after the company vanished from the map! The Eckerd si...
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The Final Remnant of Jerry Lewis Cinema.... Sort of

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  Several decades ago, long before the days of cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scams fronted by popular online personalities, there was a different get-rich-quick scheme that bankrupted many people, all because they trusted a likable personality they recognized from their TV screens. And while the celebrity-led hoaxes of today are usually only visible online, this particular one from the 1970s still has a physical remnant standing right here in New Jersey. (Kinnelon Cinema 3, pictured in September 2024. I assure you, it looks the exact same in April 2025.) Just off of Route 23 in Kinnelon, New Jersey, you can find the Meadtown Shopping Center. It’s a perfectly boring strip mall containing the usual suspects, (a dollar store, tanning salon, gym, and handful of restaurants,) but at the backside of the property lies a small, lonesome brick structure. Sitting on a plot roughly 7500 square feet in size, this unassuming building hides quietly behind the other businesses and waits for the da...
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The Final 1980s Stop & Shop Storefront

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Looking at the abandoned Paramus, NJ Stop & Shop from the parking lot. While this probably just looks like a photo of a dirty, grimy, abandoned building, it's worth taking a closer look. As you can probably read from under the fading hastily-applied cover, this was once a Stop & Shop supermarket. However, those words on the awning are surprisingly hard to find in public these days.  An empty sign frame for the supermarket sits near Route 17 S. in Paramus. The former supermarket is lurking in the background. The barely-visible logo above the former Stop & Shop in Paramus, NJ is the final remaining example of the 1982 logo visible on a storefront. The company has changed its logo three times since this one was introduced, and you can see all of the newer variations on this article from Logos-World.net for a deeper dive into their history. To my knowledge, all other locations (open or closed) got their signage updated since this logo was changed in 2002. Unfortunately, th...
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Hello!

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Thanks for visiting. My name is Luke, and I’m here to write about some arguably negligible pieces of history. I reside in New Jersey, where I’ve become an avid researcher of local history, retail history, and historic architecture over the past decade. For a while now, I’ve thought about writing and photographing so-called “stragglers” along the commercial landscape, where only one, or a few, examples remain of a once-common sight.  I first had the idea for this blog in 2017, when I paid a visit to the final operating Howard Johnson’s restaurant. While the HoJo restaurant chain is now a distant memory, (that final location closed in 2022,) there are many other “stragglers” still out in the world to talk about. Since I have a tight schedule, without the time or money to visit a different struggling restaurant chain across the country every week, I’m including many “stragglers” in the mix, with a pretty lenient definition. What you can expect to see here are rare remnants of specific...
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