Have You Ever Lived in a Strip Mall?

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #38

Dec 29

This week we’re in Lambertville, New Jersey. We’ve got two buildings, both part of the same strip plaza, today. First is this CVS:

And across the parking lot is this other structure, that forms the half of the shopping center with smaller stores and restaurants:

Here’s the aerial view:

The plaza dates to 1971 or ’72, and both structures are recognizably the same on the aerial images from the early 1970s.

The CVS, it turns out, used to be an A&P supermarket, one of two supermarkets once located within the town of Lambertville. Today, there are no supermarkets—Lambertville residents shop either across the river in Pennsylvania, or in Flemington, New Jersey. There’s not anything inside the CVS to identify it as an old A&P, but if it looks a tad large for a drugstore, that’s because it is.

Now the other building, as far as I’m aware, didn’t used to be anything else. But take a look at it. Have you ever seen apartments above stores within an otherwise standard strip plaza? I have never seen anything like this except in downtown areas of actual towns. I’m not aware of any others in Lambertville, or anywhere else, except some modern mixed-use developments.

Even though this is from the 1970s, it’s sort of a throwback to very early strip malls, which still resembled urban blocks, despite their suburban, car-oriented placement. So at one time, in a brand new piece of suburban-style construction at the edge of Lambertville’s downtown, people lived in apartments with neighborhood stores and a supermarket right downstairs or across the parking lot! (Perhaps the store owners lived upstairs, but I believe they are rented separately.)

This is one of those things that I find really interesting—it’s basically a rudimentary version of a mixed-use development, decades before that idea had become trendy. There are very, very few examples of this sort of construction, outside of downtowns, between the postwar years and the rise of New Urbanism in the 1990s. It’s so ordinary, but so unusual.

A couple more shots:

Unfortunately the building was damaged during Hurricane Ida in early September. The stores still appear to be closed and the whole building was posted “unsafe structure” when I was here in October. The building may end up getting torn down. I hope not. First, because it’s people’s homes and businesses. But second, because in its ordinary way, it’s really cool.

Is This Really a Strip Mall?

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