The Marsh on Forest Avenue in Marion’s Northgate Shopping Center opened in 1960. The company first remodeled the building in the 1980s before changing the layout again in 2005 to closer resemble its new “Lifestyle” supermarkets like the one in Fort Wayne. Fresh Encounter, an Ohio grocer, purchased the building out of bankruptcy in 2017. Today, it’s a Needler’s Fresh Market.
“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. 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. This was my sixty-seventh entry into the series.