By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
Before there were dollar stores, there were stores like Murphy’s.
Murphy’s at Central Park Plaza, 1957
George Murphy opened his first store in McKeesport, Pa., in 1900 after several years of working in the store of his cousin, John McCrory, whose name also lived on in a chain of stores that reached into Western New York.
G.C. Murphy & Co. called its locations “variety stores,” perhaps to differentiate from its biggest competitor, F.W. Woolworth’s “five and dime” stores. They both sold a variety of relatively inexpensive items, many locations of both had lunch counters, and in many places, they even operated on the same block.
The first G.C. Murphy & Co. store in Buffalo opened at 978 Broadway in 1923 – and spent decades next door to Woolworth’s near the corner of Fillmore Avenue.
The first floor was devoted to 5- to 25-cent merchandise, along with “a sanitary soda fountain and luncheonette department.”
In North Tonawanda, the former Schulmeister’s on Webster Street became a Murphy’s in the 1930s and spent decades serving Tonawandans from the location next door to Tully’s Hardware.
Lunch counter at Murphy’s in North Tonawanda, 1975
The Central Park Plaza’s G.C. Murphy store was the company’s first plaza store in the area, and became one of the final original stores to hang in through the plaza’s decline into the 1980s. Now bulldozed, replaced with the Highland Park Apartments, and mostly forgotten, when the Central Park Plaza opened in 1957 – built on a 17.5-acre ruin of an old quarry just east of Main and Fillmore – the 29-store plaza was Buffalo’s largest shopping center and a regional retail destination.
By the mid-’60s, there were nine Murphy’s 5 & 10 stores in the greater Buffalo area, including Broadway-Fillmore, Central Park Plaza, North Tonawanda, Lancaster, Fredonia, Leroy, Medina, Jamestown and Dansville.
Murphy’s in the Village of Lancaster, 1975
Murphy’s was bought out by Ames in 1985, but then spun the stores off to McCrory in 1989. Most of the Murphy stores were shuttered with the Ames buyout, but the last of the G.C. Murphy & Co. locations closed when McCrory folded in 2001.
