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I don't know what made me think of this just now. I wonder if, for a city its size, Buffalo was unusual in having relatively large, busy shopping districts outside of the downtown core. I'm not talking about collections of neighborhood stores, or post-WWII shopping plazas, but rather something like a secondary downtown, having a wide range of retail and commercial services, including large full service department stores.
Buffalo's secondary downtowns didn't have skylines, but they had a level of commercial activity that might rival the downtown of a smaller city. One such district, the mere mention of which can drive local Boomers into weepy fits of nostalgia, is the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood. It once has three large full-service department stores, Sattler's, Kobacker's, and Sears. The area served as Bufflao's Akihabara, with several very large furniture stores, and dozens of smaller appliance and TV/radio stores. There was also the Broadway Market, and a few hundred smaller merchants. The surrounding neighborhood had a density approaching 40,000 residents per square mile, but almost no apartment buildings. Most residents lived in worker's cottages, telescoping houses, and two-flats, on narrow lots that often had full-sized front and rear houses.
The Broadway-Fillmore shopping district catered largely to bargain hunters, and working and lower middle class shoppers. It remained a viable shopping district into the 1970s, but its rapidly aging population (with accompanying limited incomes), racial and socioeconomic transition of East Side neighborhoods to the north, competition from suburban shopping districts (and, at the time, downtown), and a changing retail climate added up to inevitable decline. Newspaper articles and editorials started to hint at the downward trajectory of Broadway-Fillmore in the 1950s.
The Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood is now Buffalo's emptiest expanse of urban prairie. The Broadway Market is still there, but attracts relatively few shoppers outside of the Christmas and Easter holidays. Very little retail remains; all the department stores, appliance and electronic stores, and clothing and jewelery stores are gone. Broadway has a few dollar stores, a Rainbow Shops location, Aldi, a beauty accessory store, a pawn shop, a furniture rental store, and a bunch of Yemeni delis -- the Buffalo equivalent to a New York bodega or Detroit party store.
Hertel Avenue in North Buffalo was once home to the flagship location of The Sample, a local upscale junior department store chain, The stiore closed in 1990. Shortly afterwards, the former Sample building was rehabbed for senior citizen apartments.
Hertel Avenue is still relatively intact as a secondary retail district, although it's gotten less practical and more "boutiquey" in the past few decades. The surrounding area was always comfortably middle to upper middle class, and it's been experiencing rapidly rising home prices over the past 10-15 years.
The days of buying into a good Buffalo neighborhood for under $100K are long, long gone.
A few other neighborhoods had full-service department stores. Hens & Kelly had branch locations in Riverside and Kensington. I don't know where the Riverside store was, but the Kensington location disappeared in the mid-1960s. It sat in the path of the Kensington Expressway, and torn down during that highway's construction. (Hens & Kelly almost made a comeback in Kensington a little over a decade later, as a planned anchor tenant of the never-built Kensington Mall.)
A big 3-story freestanding Sears store, complete with a large parking ramp, anchored the intersection of Main Street and Jefferson Avenue. I remember going there when I was a kid; it was a lot closer to our house than the Sears at Eastern Hills Mall. My grandmother had a part-time job at the candy counter at the entrance at the north end of the store, near the location of a Deco restaurant. Sears was "uptown", but it really wasn't in a secondary downtown area. I remember a big Cresbury's men's store a couple blocks to the north, at the corner of Main and Kensington (torn down for a Metro Rail station) that Dad really liked, and some post-riot remnants of indie retail along the once-busy Jefferson Avenue corridor. (An aside: the East Side riots were tame by the standards of Rochester and Detroit, but it still affected Buffalo's psyche. It also served as a kind of final push to implement long-standing plans to integrate public schools and public safety agencies.)
Some of Buffalo's pre-1970 peer cities had uptown districts, but I don't know if they were as "complete" as Broadway-Fillmore, or even North Buffalo. The University Circle area in Cleveland used to be quite busy, with national chain stores lining Euclid Avenue between East 79th and CWRU, and large apartment buildings and apartment hotels on the surrounding blocks. However, University Circle didn't have any full service department stores. Today, there's almost no evidence left of that area's past life as a retail district. Most of the Euclid Avenue retail corridor was absorbed into the Cleveland Clinic campus.
Buffalo's secondary downtowns didn't have skylines, but they had a level of commercial activity that might rival the downtown of a smaller city. One such district, the mere mention of which can drive local Boomers into weepy fits of nostalgia, is the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood. It once has three large full-service department stores, Sattler's, Kobacker's, and Sears. The area served as Bufflao's Akihabara, with several very large furniture stores, and dozens of smaller appliance and TV/radio stores. There was also the Broadway Market, and a few hundred smaller merchants. The surrounding neighborhood had a density approaching 40,000 residents per square mile, but almost no apartment buildings. Most residents lived in worker's cottages, telescoping houses, and two-flats, on narrow lots that often had full-sized front and rear houses.
The Broadway-Fillmore shopping district catered largely to bargain hunters, and working and lower middle class shoppers. It remained a viable shopping district into the 1970s, but its rapidly aging population (with accompanying limited incomes), racial and socioeconomic transition of East Side neighborhoods to the north, competition from suburban shopping districts (and, at the time, downtown), and a changing retail climate added up to inevitable decline. Newspaper articles and editorials started to hint at the downward trajectory of Broadway-Fillmore in the 1950s.
The Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood is now Buffalo's emptiest expanse of urban prairie. The Broadway Market is still there, but attracts relatively few shoppers outside of the Christmas and Easter holidays. Very little retail remains; all the department stores, appliance and electronic stores, and clothing and jewelery stores are gone. Broadway has a few dollar stores, a Rainbow Shops location, Aldi, a beauty accessory store, a pawn shop, a furniture rental store, and a bunch of Yemeni delis -- the Buffalo equivalent to a New York bodega or Detroit party store.
Hertel Avenue in North Buffalo was once home to the flagship location of The Sample, a local upscale junior department store chain, The stiore closed in 1990. Shortly afterwards, the former Sample building was rehabbed for senior citizen apartments.
Hertel Avenue is still relatively intact as a secondary retail district, although it's gotten less practical and more "boutiquey" in the past few decades. The surrounding area was always comfortably middle to upper middle class, and it's been experiencing rapidly rising home prices over the past 10-15 years.
The days of buying into a good Buffalo neighborhood for under $100K are long, long gone.
A few other neighborhoods had full-service department stores. Hens & Kelly had branch locations in Riverside and Kensington. I don't know where the Riverside store was, but the Kensington location disappeared in the mid-1960s. It sat in the path of the Kensington Expressway, and torn down during that highway's construction. (Hens & Kelly almost made a comeback in Kensington a little over a decade later, as a planned anchor tenant of the never-built Kensington Mall.)
A big 3-story freestanding Sears store, complete with a large parking ramp, anchored the intersection of Main Street and Jefferson Avenue. I remember going there when I was a kid; it was a lot closer to our house than the Sears at Eastern Hills Mall. My grandmother had a part-time job at the candy counter at the entrance at the north end of the store, near the location of a Deco restaurant. Sears was "uptown", but it really wasn't in a secondary downtown area. I remember a big Cresbury's men's store a couple blocks to the north, at the corner of Main and Kensington (torn down for a Metro Rail station) that Dad really liked, and some post-riot remnants of indie retail along the once-busy Jefferson Avenue corridor. (An aside: the East Side riots were tame by the standards of Rochester and Detroit, but it still affected Buffalo's psyche. It also served as a kind of final push to implement long-standing plans to integrate public schools and public safety agencies.)
Some of Buffalo's pre-1970 peer cities had uptown districts, but I don't know if they were as "complete" as Broadway-Fillmore, or even North Buffalo. The University Circle area in Cleveland used to be quite busy, with national chain stores lining Euclid Avenue between East 79th and CWRU, and large apartment buildings and apartment hotels on the surrounding blocks. However, University Circle didn't have any full service department stores. Today, there's almost no evidence left of that area's past life as a retail district. Most of the Euclid Avenue retail corridor was absorbed into the Cleveland Clinic campus.
