By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Thirty-five years ago this week, The News began celebrating the 100th anniversary of the paper’s starting a daily edition.
In the special section called One Hundred Years of Finance and Commerce, The News recounted the history of a handful of Buffalo’s financial and commercial industries and provided ad space for many companies involved in those industries to tout their own contributions.
It was difficult to ignore the decline of downtown Buffalo shopping by 1980, and while the first pages of the special section were devoted to the names that conjured up thoughts of Main Street, the next pages talked about malls.
Oddly, and maybe with the same sort of vision problems suffered by downtown businessmen, the only actual malls mentioned (very briefly) in the story were the Thruway and Boulevard Malls. While the Eastern Hills, Main Place, Seneca and Summit Park Malls weren’t mentioned, somehow the Grant-Ferry and Broadway Market districts were lumped in with suburban shopping.
