The Independent Edition

Towne Market Owner: Sal Cassar Opened:  1978 Cooperative:  none Location:  135 S Main St, Phillipsburg, NJ Photographed:  January 2021 Phillipsburg is home to a ShopRite and a Stop & Shop out on route 22 (I guess those are technically Greenwich, but they're both referred to as Phillipsburg), and until recently also an Ahart's Market on 22. But in addition to that, the town has a few small independent grocery stores that are kind of on the borderline between convenience stores and grocery stores. One of them is here in downtown Phillipsburg, Towne Market, and although I didn't go in, it's clearly a wonderful specimen of grocery history. We can also get a glimpse here of downtown Phillipsburg, a quiet riverfront town. The rest of the town is up the hill from the river, and has some beautiful historic neighborhoods. Phillipsburg can be considered part of the Lehigh Valley (the reporting on the closure of Ahart's can be found on lehighvalleylive.com ) and definitel...

Cather's Food Mart Owner: Antoinette Boutros Opened:  1998 under current ownership Cooperative:  none Location:  159 Hudson St, Phillipsburg, NJ Photographed:  January 2022 Our second store here in Phillipsburg is a very old grocery store at the top of the hill above Towne Market , and like many of these stores has been cut back to basically a convenience store over the years. (The store once had a butcher in-store, as evidenced by this obituary .) Online records suggest that the owner since 1998 has been Antoinette Boutros, and that might be true but at the time of my first visit in January 2021, the person who I assumed was the owner was almost definitely not named Antoinette Boutros, but who knows. My January 2021 attempt at photography was thoroughly unsuccessful due to a confrontation with said assumed owner, so unfortunately I have no interior pictures but I did get these exterior shots when driving by in January 2022. The interior is definitely well-preserved...

Gino's Market Owner: Gino Forteburno Opened:  1977 Cooperative:  none Location:  541 Congress St, Phillipsburg, NJ Photographed:  January 2022 I've wanted to come here to Gino's Market for quite some time, and I was initially planning to come here on the same day that I visited Towne Market and Cather's for the first time. Something told me to visit Cather's instead of Gino's, possibly just the fact that it was more on my way home than Gino's, but oh man my intuition has never led me so wrong. I did get to return to Gino's in January 2022, and it was entirely worth the stop. Everyone passing through Phillipsburg should be stopping here for lunch! I did, and I got an amazing sandwich (more on that shortly), and also talked to Gino for a while. He told me all about the history of the store, which began back in 1920 when the Ingersoll company (now Ingersoll-Rand, a maker of industrial and construction equipment) was developing a large part of Phillipsbur...