Round And Round In Somerville, New Jersey

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #267

I was just looking at a building right outside Somerville, New Jersey in the other week’s “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?”, and we’re back in the area with a neat old aerial photo of the Somerville Circle, thanks to a post from Greg Gillette, who works for Hillsborough Township, New Jersey as a local historian.

I’ve driven around or through this a million times, from back when I was a little kid to when we visit Somerville during New Jersey trips today. I can see a few things here that are still there or at least that were there when I was a kid. Here is the roughly similar view today:

The building at 12 o’clock was a Rickel hardware store, like a smaller Home Depot. I vaguely remember their going-out-of-business sale, in 1998. It got divided into a Staples and Petco; it looks like the little segment on the left was always a couple of smaller stores.

At roughly 9 o’clock is now a Quick Chek convenience store, but it was an old motel with (I believe) an on-site Denny’s, and this quirky tower, from the days when signs were really in your face. This was only torn down in 2017.

Over at 3 o’clock is a big shopping center built in the 1950s, which once had a Grand Union supermarket that became a Barnes & Noble. It’s had many stores come and go, but one of the oldest tenants is K&S Italian Specialties, a real old-school Italian deli and market, whose website says the store itself first opened in the 1940s! (They have the best soppressata, the kind really hung from a ceiling.)

There are four buildings in the middle-ish part of the frame that I’m not sure about, and seem to have either been replaced or seriously altered. Three, northeast of the center of the circle, were in my childhood The Wiz electronics store, a state-of-the-art Toys ‘R’ Us, and a P.C. Richard appliance store, which is improbably the only one still in business. It’s a regional 66-store chain, with loose origins in 1909 (a hardware store). The fourth unknown building, above the big shopping center, was a Circuit City, then a Buy Buy Baby, and now a quite nice Indian supermarket.

Of course, if this sort of “When I was little this was something else…” doesn’t interest you, well, it doesn’t interest you. It does interest me. But as I often try to note, I’m not just rattling off trivia when I do this. I think the way the businesses shift over time is really interesting. You can take one of these little commercial nodes and tell a whole story of 20th century land use and retail.

The Somerville Circle dates to the 1930s, when the area was mostly rural. That was the very beginning of the cars-and-suburbs era. By the postwar period, you had the big shopping center that’s still there, and while some of the buildings are different, the basic placement, and the extremely car-oriented form, was present and is still present.

You had the rise and fall of “category killer” big-box retailers. Look how many there were here: Rickel (home improvement), The Wiz and Circuit City (consumer electronics), Buy Buy Baby (babies), Toys ‘R’ Us (toys). (Though the Petco, Barnes & Noble, and Staples survive.) You see the disappearance of a motel, as that form became outmoded. You see a Grand Union supermarket, a typical American chain supermarket, disappear and then, a couple of decades later, a supermarket return to the circle, but this time serving a growing immigrant and ethnic community.

All of that happened in less than a century. I think that’s so cool, and I hope you do too!

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Related Reading:

Wheels Of Time

The Shell Of The Clam (Bar)

Hail Mercedes, Full Of Gas

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