So many "Views of Narberth Past" astonish us with the strangeness that comes from great change over decades. This view achieves the effect with the familiar. How little has this section of Haverford avenue changed in over 100 years!
230 Haverford Avenue housed a grocery store for 90 years. In 1932, The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, (A&P), at that time the largest retail company in the nation, leased the building from C. P. Cook, the owner of most of the block. In 1964, as A&P was contracting, the lease was taken up by twin brothers Paul and Angelo Bovo to open the American Family Market.
The Bovos ran the market for 58 years until 2022. Since then, the building has sat empty.
Growth of Haverford Avenue
The familiarity owes much to the ownership of the real estate by a single family over three generations. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Chester Preston Cook (1877–1942) acquired the coal yard that covered much of the south side of Haverford Avenue.
In 1909, Cook began to develop the street front, first with #230, the "Narberth Garage", that housed the plumbing business of Narberth volunteer fireman George B. Suplee. The block of one-story stores to its left was constructed between 1913 and 1919.
Cook converted the garage into the Narberth Variety Store in 1922. Over the next 10 years, it was operated by a series of proprietors, among them, Vincent Mariani and the Adelizzi brothers.
In 2020, after 114 years of ownership that had passed from grandfather to father to son, the Cook family sold the enire block to RIR Narberth Investors, LLC.
References
A choice market survives in Narberth, by Rick Nichols (Philadelphia Inquirer, c.2000)
Big Haverford Avenue Store Changes Hands, Our Town, January 29, 1932, page 4
C. P. Cook was also a history lover and map collector. At the time of his death he had recently been elected President of the Montgomery County Historical Society, who wrote him a tribute.
Updated July 30, 2026.