Buffalo in the 50s: Wednesday is Downtown Shopping Day

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

Buffalo’s downtown merchants spent most of the 1950s encouraging the ladies of the house to get on the bus and head downtown to shop on Wednesdays.

Women who donned a hat and grabbed the charge-a-plate and a few bus tokens were treated to sales like the ones outlined on these two pages from a Wednesday 60 years ago this week.

When this ad appeared in 1955, bargains were to be had at stores such as Tanke’s, Kleinhans, JN Adam’s, Hens & Kelly, Oppenheim Collins, Victor’s, Hengerer’s, Neisner’s, Flint & Kent, Kobacker’s, Berber’s, AM&A’s, Grant’s and plenty of others.

Published by

Steve Cichon

Steve Cichon writes about Buffalo’s pop culture history. His stories of Buffalo's past have appeared more than 1600 times in The Buffalo News. He's a proud Buffalonian helping the world experience the city he loves. Since the earliest days of the internet, Cichon's been creating content celebrating the people, places, and ideas that make Buffalo unique and special. The 25-year veteran of Buffalo radio and television has written five books and curates The Buffalo Stories Archives-- hundreds of thousands of books, images, and audio/visual media which tell the stories of who we are in Western New York.