The Cronig brothers are expanding again. Robert and David Cronig, who inherited their father’s grocery business in Vineyard Haven’s center in 1956, have enlarged their Main street market twice. And now they are building an even larger market outside of town on State Road.
Cronig’s Main Street Market, the 72-year-old grocery business in Vineyard Haven, will close its doors for the final time on Thursday, Oct. 26.
Despite the public outcry supporting the traditional market, the Cronig family will convert the building into three smaller retail shops before the 1990 summer season.
An agreement was signed Saturday between Carlyle Cronig, whose family owns the land and building, and John F. and John L. Schilling, the father and son who have owned and managed the business for the past six years.
Healthy Additions, the Vineyard’s newest health product store, plans to open in June. Located in Vineyard Haven next to Cronig’s, the two-story retail outlet will be solar-energized and fully accessible to disabled customers, with a sliding-glass front door, a large handicap-accessible elevator and disabled-friendly bathrooms.
An electric refrigerating plant has been installed in Cronig Brother’s market. It is said that some of the other markets are also to have plants installed.
Samuel Cronig, head of the firm of Cronig Bros., was the purchaser of Castello’s Block and while the changes are not all as predicted, they correspond closely. Barnacles will cling to the building opposite the one they now occupy, upstairs but with entrance from the Lane Block, as we hear.
As our community grows, so grows the grocery store business up-Island. The new Up-Island Cronig’s Market opened for business last Friday with no fanfare. The new 7,500 square foot steel and wood structure, not far from the site of the original building, welcomed its first customers.
Less than two months after Indian Hill Market came up for sale, Stephen Bernier has signed a purchase and sales agreement with owners Howard and Susan Ulfelder.
Mr. Bernier is the owner of Cronig’s State Road Market in Tisbury. Papers for Indian Hill will pass March 31, he says.
“We’re not going to turn it into a gourmet food store,” says Mr. Bernier. “Its going to be an Up-Island Cronig’s.” Mr. Bernier is planning to keep it open seven days a week, as his predecessors have.
A Vineyard business tradition of nearly 10 years and a family tradition reaching back to Eastern Europe and the last century will end in January with the sale of Cronig’s State Road Market to an off-Island resident.
Samuel Cronig, best known as Sam, a grocer of Vineyard Haven, bought a box of “gold-coin” chocolates this week, chocolates which are so moulded and wrapped as to resemble twenty-dollar gold pieces. “I’ve got an anniversary coming up, or rather it has passed but the observance is due, and I want to give these away to commemorate the event,” he explained. “It’s a fifty-year anniversary, you see.”
But it wasn’t a wedding anniversary. Rather it is the anniversary of Sam’s arrival in America, fifty years ago, shortly before Halloween, a day which he will never forget.
