The Marsh on Hoyt Avenue in Muncie was built in 1977 as a Ross Supermarket. Marsh purchased the chain in 2000 and operated it as LoBill, MainStreet Market, and Marsh until 2017. Today, the building is home to a self-storage facility.
“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.
That’s where we shopped in college, when it was Ross! It was never really a great neighborhood and I’m surprised a supermarket lasted there as long as it did!
I am too! I popped in a few times.