By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
From the roof of AM&A’s in 1960, very few of the buildings seen here would still be standing a decade later.
Buffalo News archives
While the venerable Buffalo retailing names like Tanke and Ulbrich, which dated back to the 1850s and 1870s, would hold on until the 1980s, the buildings they’d called home for generations would not. Most of the block was torn down to make way for the Main Place Mall.
The buildings on the other side of Pearl Street the next block over would eventually be replaced by the Rath Building, the Family Court Building, and the Fernbach parking ramp.
Among the buildings in the footprint where the Rath Building now stands was the Hotel Niagara. Through the ’40s and ’50s, the piano bar at Ryan’s Hotel Niagara was one of the Queen City’s most frequented and well-remembered gay night spots.
One building still standing: Old County Hall, which was just County Hall then, but it was still almost 90 years old.
