BY ANN GENADER
WEST MILFORD ‑ The long-awaited renovation of the West Milford ShopRite supermarket is under way and showing progress.
The project was the subject of the West Milford Planning Board back as far as 2008. The design has changed numerous times since then with the final plan now in place and work is going on daily.
The approved plan includes redesign of the main entrance with updating of the 1960s façade. The interior is being expanded by about 4,000 square feet.
Karen O’Shea, a corporate spokesperson for the retail cooperative and supplier of ShopRite of West Milford, Wakefern Food Corporation told The West Milford Messenger in July that the renovation would get going by the end of summer and take nine months to a year to complete. She also said that the store will remain open during the renovation period.
The parking lot has already been reconfigured and tree plantings done.
The property is about 15 acres. Visible and already operating in the renovated shopping center is a former movie theater that is now a TJ Maxx store that is open and doing business. The supermarket is being expanded into an area that was Frank’s Pizza restaurant.
The plan is for the pizzeria to be relocated into the space at the end of the plaza which was once the West Milford Post Office and more recently the location for the Just-A-Buck store.
Shoppers can expect a modernized store with wider aisles, more user friendly sites – such as an improve entrance and exit areas, township planner Charles McGroarty said at a West Milford Environmental Commission meeting in 2008 when the project was first introduced.
At a still earlier Planning Board meeting he said the more than 30-year-old building was the state of the art when it was built but the facility had become tired and needed to be replaced.
Before the shopping center was built the Manetas family gladioli farm occupied the property. The farm supplied thousands of the flowers to the New York City flower market annually for decades.
During the project approval process the Planning Board stressed that it wanted the project to fit in with West Milford’s developing streetscape plan.
West Milford’s only other supermarket was the A&P in a shopping plaza in Hewitt. The store closed in 2015 and has remained empty ever since.