“Abandoned Marsh” was my project to stylistically document the Marsh supermarkets closed by Sun Capital Partners, an investment firm that owned the home-grown company for the final decade of its eighty-six year history. Marsh was a regional grocery store chain that was founded in Muncie and eventually grew to encompass 157 supermarkets, 154 convenience stores, three florists, two catering services, and a restaurant. The last Marsh supermarket closed in 2017.
The company’s stores built from around 1980 to 2004 or so were easily identifiable because of their angular greenhouses and dark brick massing. Instead of taking pictures of the buildings, I decided to create 18×24 vector files in Adobe Illustrator, focusing on the complexity of their angles and how shadows and highlights interacted with them.
The Marsh Supermarket in Huntington, Indiana was my seventh entry into the series. It opened in 1990 and it closed nineteen years later. Today, a portion of the building is home to Planet Fitness.
Ted Shideler 