The O’Malia Food Market on State Road 135 in Indianapolis opened in 1973 as Safeway. Later, it became a Mr. D’s Food Store. Marsh purchased Mr. D’s in 2003 and rebranded the store O’Malia’s after buying the chain two years prior. The store closed in 2016. Today, it’s home to Ace Hardware.
“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.
