I’ll admit this one confused me at first — I had no recollection that W.T. Grant’s, the old department store chain, had expanded its lunch counters (and every department store had a lunch counter back then) into full-fledged restaurants. But apparently they did. In 1973, Grant’s was running two Bradford House restaurants in its strip mall stores in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, even as the downtown Grant’s was preparing to close.
Bradford, named for the Pennsylvania county where W.T. Grant was born, was the name for many of Grant’s in-house lines, including its appliances. We had several Bradford appliances growing up, and they seemed to be eternal. We bought a Bradford air conditioner in 1968 that was still running when my mother sold her house in 2000, and by all appearances it’s still there.