Long Island supermarkets we miss: Pathmark, Waldbaum's and more

The supermarkets of Long Islanders' youth seemed as if they would always be there. The names emblazoned across them — Grand Union, Waldbaum’s, Food Fair, A&P — established them as staples. And when those names left, it wasn’t corporate trademarks that went away; it was a way of life.

In the days before two-car families, a trip to the grocery store was an outing in itself. Families with their purchases often got trading stamps, the midcentury physical equivalent of credit-card cashback points. And each week, a supermarket might offer a piece of free or nominally priced tableware, cookware or even an encyclopedia volume. Today you’re lucky if they pack your shopping bag.

And it was a Long Island chain, our very own King Kullen — formerly of Bethpage, now based in Hauppauge — that is often credited as having launched the first supermarket, back in 1930 in Queens. There’s some dispute, but there’s no arguing King Kullen is synonymous with the Island, with 27 supermarkets here plus four of its Wild by Nature natural-food stores.

Yet we’ll always remember those chains gone by. 

Pathmark

Everyone called him "the Pathmark man."

Actor James Karen (1923-2018) had begun his Pathmark commercials in 1970, initially costarring with home economist Ruth Covell, and continued into the 1990s. "I’ll never forget  the first time I saw him in an episode of a TV show," says Gail Dobbs Rhodes, 60, who grew up in Kings Park and now lives in Little River, South Carolina. "I don't even know the name of the show, but our mouths just hung open because we were, like, ‘Oh my God, it's the Pathmark man!’"

What she remembers even more vividly is driving with her parents to Lynbrook every Thursday in the 1970s to take her grandfather, William H. Goerlich, grocery shopping at the Pathmark in Franklin Square, now a Stop & Shop.

Today, Rhodes reflects, "I wish I’d known how much I would miss those shopping trips. I should have enjoyed the wonderful company more and complained less." Her grandfather passed away in 1993, age 101. "I know it's crazy, but Pathmark will always be a special place for me."

Only in memory, mostly, since the chain, founded in 1968, was purchased in 2007 by A&P. When that company went bankrupt in 2015, Pathmark supermarkets disappeared — until 2019, when Allegiance Retail Services, which purchases old trademarks and other intellectual properties, opened the first new Pathmark supermarket in years, in Brooklyn.

Waldbaum’s

From a butter-and-egg shop founded by the Waldbaum family in Brooklyn in 1904, Waldbaum’s gradually added stores and later opened supermarkets until it became the 12th-largest such chain in the country. It remained mostly in the family even after going public in 1961, and throughout that decade hundreds of its in-house brand items bore the face of matriarch Julia Waldbaum.

In the mid-1960s, Waldbaum’s moved its headquarters to Garden City. Later, it relocated to Central Islip. A&P absorbed the chain in 1986, keeping the Waldbaum’s names on those stores. Then in 2015, A&P declared its second and final bankruptcy. The last of Long Island’s 32 Waldbaum’s closed in July of that year.

Chelsea Lowe remembers lasting two weeks as a 16-year-old employee at the Waldbaum’s in the Baldwin Harbor Shopping Center, on Atlantic Avenue, in the late 1970s. Today a Massachusetts-based editor, she herself blames her wisecracking ways.

"I was kind of sassy with the customers," the former Baldwin resident admits. "I was packing groceries for this woman — and, remember, this was my first time working in a supermarket, and I don't think I had gotten a lot of training — and she didn't like the way I packed," she recalls. "She said, ‘You don't put sugar with wet things, do you?’ And I said, ‘Apparently, I do.’" Sometime afterward, "They just stopped putting me on the schedule."

That Waldbaum’s space remains today, now a Stop & Shop.

A&P

One of the most storied brands in American retail, A&P — the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company — was founded as a predecessor firm in New York City in 1859. By 1900, it had become the largest grocery chain in the country. A&P opened its first supermarket in the mid-1930s in Pennsylvania, and at the chain’s peak in 1969 had more than twice the sales of its closest rival, Safeway.

Retired communications worker Karen Steinhaus, 69, of East Northport, remembers the A&P  formerly on Main Street in Huntington Village. "Dad did the driving and we always went as a family — three littles and two parents in a 1956 green Chevy station wagon with no seat belts or car seats," she says, adding cheerfully, "It was a family outing for us."

And no one ever forgets the smell of A&P’s Eight O’Clock Coffee, the house brand, which you bought as whole beans and custom-ground using a machine at the cash register.

"The aroma of the freshly ground coffee was delectable," remembers retired school administrator Linda Scalice, 69, of Lindenhurst, who shopped with her family at the A&P once at North Wellwood Avenue . "You’d empty the bag of beans into the top of the red machine, choose the grind you preferred by turning the dial and then held the now-empty bag in the chute at the bottom. There must have been a button to start it, and the ground coffee filled the bag."

Great coffee or not, A&P’s sales began to slow, and Safeway became the national leader in 1973. Two years later, A&P closed more than 1,200 stores — becoming profitable again by 1982 and acquiring other chains, including Waldbaum’s in 1986 and Pathmark in 2007. But in 2010 and again in 2015, A&P declared bankruptcy. The last A&P closed in 2016.

Steinhaus’ childhood store is now a Wild by Nature. Scalice’s is the event space Bisou. But Eight O’Clock Coffee still exists, divested by A&P in 2003 and now its own Maryland-based company.

Penn Fruit

The Penn Fruit chain began as a Philadelphia produce shop in 1927. It eventually become known for its trademark "Quonset hut" design, a midcentury marvel designed by architect George Neff. "Its distinctive arch-roofed form and glass front were characteristic features of Penn Fruit supermarkets constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, an era in which the company embraced modern architecture and the barrel roof as core elements of its corporate identity," reads the successful application for one Philly store’s historical-landmark designation in 2016.

The chain came to Long Island in 1957, in the newly constructed Eastgate Shopping Plaza at Hempstead Turnpike and Wantagh Avenue in Levittown. Penn Fruit quickly opened a second outlet that year, in Manhasset, and a third two years later, in Hicksville.

Cheryl Lynn Blum, 75, a retired teacher and grant writer then of Plainview and now of Huntington, remembers the Hicksville store at the intersection of Old Country, Plainview and South Oyster Bay roads. On Saturdays, her parents would take her and her older brother there for grocery shopping.

In the car, "We listened to what they were talking about," Blum recalls. "We listened to them talk about prices. We didn't sit with phones or tablets — we listened to adult conversations."

The Farmingdale-based Hills chain of supermarkets bought all three Long Island Penn Fruit stores in late 1963, though the Levittown outlet continued to use the Penn Fruit name through at least April of the following year. Food Fair in turn acquired Hills in May 1977, but filed for bankruptcy that October.

Outside the New York area, Penn Fruit soldiered on before itself declaring bankruptcy in 1975 and shutting down in 1979. The Hicksville intersection is now a confluence of gas stations and fast-food restaurants, with no trace of the Penn Fruit "hut" to be found.

Grand Union

Tracing its origins to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1872, Grand Union grew to become one of the East’s major supermarket chains. At one point it boasted more than 900 stores; at least 30 dotted Long Island in the mid-1970s.

Seaford’s Don Miller, 66, a public relations professional, worked at the one on Carman Avenue in Westbury — part of a strip mall Grand Union anchored — while a junior and senior at W.T. Clarke High School.

"I was a stock boy, as we were called at the time, and I got the job through a neighbor who worked in the meat department," says Miller. "We had to wear white shirts and ties. And we had the aprons and we were armed with those price-stamp machines, those big, clunky, self-inking metal ones. You would open a case of canned peas and," he says with chunka-chunka sound effects, "put the price stamps on them."

In October 2000, Grand Union filed for its third bankruptcy in five years. The chain then vanished until C&S Wholesale Grocers bought 11 Tops Markets in upstate New York and Vermont in 2021 and converted them to Grand Union, reviving the name. The Westbury shopping center now houses the Carman Avenue Veterinary Hospital, restaurants and a pharmacy among other stores.

Bohack

Bohack began in Brooklyn in 1887 and had become a big enough chain by the mid-1960s that when it went public, the major corporation Gulf + Western became majority stockholder. That helps explain why an Upper West Side Bohack appears in the movie "The Odd Couple" (1968), released by corporate stablemate Paramount Pictures.

But for Mary Leming, 56, a teacher who grew up in and still resides in Stony Brook, it was the one on her village’s Main Street she remembers for its part in an adventure during the historic Northeast blizzard of 1978.

She was about 9 or 10 and her neighborhood was essentially snowed in, she says, the roads plowed but still largely unpassable. "Nobody back then had four-wheel drive." And so after several days, she, her parents and some neighbors including other kids trekked out on a Saturday when supplies were getting low. And while her family usually shopped at Blue Jay, there was a Bohack only a mile walk away.

"It was a little pilgrimage," Leming recalls happily. "And it was a blast because the snow was up my knees and up to my hips, and you could climb on these mountains of snow and some kids were sliding on sleds, and it was a lot of fun."

There were at least seven other Bohack stores on Long Island in the mid-1970s, in Brentwood, Center Moriches, East Northport, Lindenhurst, Port Jefferson Station, West Babylon and Shirley. They and more than 50 others, all in New York City, closed down in July 1977, when the chain went bankrupt. Even hiring singer Julius LaRosa as a spokesperson earlier that year hadn’t helped. The Stony Brook location is now one of fashion designer Ann Taylor’s Loft outlets.