Westlane Shopping Center on North Michigan Road and 71st Street in Indianapolis was completed in 1959. Marsh purchased its Standard grocery store in 1982 and operated it as Marsh, LoBill Foods, and Marsh Hometown Market until about 2015. The building is unrecognizable today as home to Save A Lot.
“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. I missed this Marsh my first time around. That makes it the second brand-new Abandoned Marsh I’ve shared here, and my seventy-third overall!
I remember that Westlane store – I had friends who lived in that area in the late 80’s, and I am sure I went to buy some things there a time or two.
I wonder if it always featured that greenhouse front or if it was added later. I think Westland started more basic and Marsh added to the front.
Those greenhouse-style things were kind of a fad in the late 70s. Lots of fast food places used them for a time, Arby’s and Rax Roast Beef come to mind, and maybe Taco Bell, too.
Taco Bell for sure did, as did Wendy’s and even forgotten places like Rocky Rococo pizza. The dead Five Points Mall has an empty JCPenney I would have sworn was a Kroger based on the greenhouse.
More crazy to me is the state of the abandoned marsh stores now when they weren’t all that old. I stumble past one and see crumbling bricks. iBJ and other outlet proclaim them useless or in need of serious help. It takes away part of the timelessness I found in their facades.