Ann Page was a private brand of the A&P grocery chain.
The 11 buildings on Old Ann Page Way are shown in yellow. The dotted lines trace the sites of the old A&P buildings.
Ann Page never lived in Provincetown, although there was a time when she could have been found in nearly every house in town.
At least, in nearly every kitchen cabinet. Ann Page was a private, in-house brand of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, at one time the largest retailer in the world and an important presence in Provincetown, with grocery stores at 120 Commercial Street, 315 Commercial Street, 56 Shank Painter Road, and here, on a parcel that was once designated 32 Conwell Street.
After the Conwell Street store was demolished, this site was redeveloped in 2002-2003 by Community Housing Resource Inc., headed by Edward “Ted” Malone, into an 18-unit, 10-studio residential compound. The short, private roadway created to serve the little subdivision was named Old Ann Page Way — a cheeky but subtle nod to the property’s past.
Ann Page first appeared on the national stage in the latter 1920s, when “she” worked for A&P’s Home Service Department, dispensing household advice and menu suggestions in The A&P News, a six-page flyer given away each Monday at the company’s 14,000 grocery stores. By 1930, Miss Page had begun morphing into a brand name for company-manufactured preserves. As far as I can tell, she was never fully personified as a character, unlike Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima, though she once appeared as a silhouetted cameo.
What Ann Page really personified was the concept of vertical integration. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company operated at such tremendous volumes that it was feasible — even desirable — for the company to become its own biggest supplier. By manufacturing food products, it could set its own prices without having to pay or accommodate middlemen, brokers, wholesalers, or jobbers. And by keeping its prices low, A&P attracted customers and stymied competitors who were in no position to capitalize industrial food production. In its early years, the Ann Page brand included canned beans, egg noodles, gelatin, jam, ketchup, macaroni, mayonnaise, peanut butter, pudding, salad dressing, sandwich spread, spaghetti, stuffed olives, syrup, and tomato soup.
The Page family had grown to 550 products by 1965, when A&P opened a new food-processing plant — the world’s largest — in Horseheads, a town in the Southern Tier of New York State. The Ann Page factory had 1.5 million square feet of floor area, or more than 34 acres. The timing of the project could not have been much worse, as Marc Levinson noted in The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (2011): “The rise of television advertising in the 1950s had given a boost to brand-name foods and dulled the appeal of store brands such as Ann Page. As A&P responded to declining sales by closing stores, the Horseheads plant was badly underutilized.”
In April 1982, the company announced it would give up the Horseheads plant. Practically with the next breath, in June, it said it was abandoning the Ann Page line. A&P staggered ahead another 33 years before going out of business entirely. But in this quiet corner of Provincetown, its corporate legacy endures.