Foreclosure Looms For Buffalo's Abandoned AM&A's Department Store

If you were to take a trip into the central business district of New York State's second-largest city, perhaps one of the most significant things you would see is how abandoned the 300 block of Main Street seems.

On one side of the street, you have the shuttered former Main Place Mall, which at one point was a key shopping center and gathering place in Buffalo, that has been closed to the public for years. On the other side of the street, you have one of Buffalo's most iconic buildings, which represents the past of Buffalo's place as a retail giant, that is now in a fair bit of legal trouble... again.

According to the Buffalo News, the former home of the Adam, Meldrum & Anderson Company department store is in foreclosure and authority, and creditors have a fair amount of work ahead of them to figure out what to do next.

Former AM&A's Flagship Store In Foreclosure Again

The former AM&A's flagship store, located on the 300 block of Main Street in downtown Buffalo, was a massive retail shop that sits on nearly an entire city block and boasts more than 300,000 square feet of space. It was once a huge hub of retail activity in downtown Buffalo. In addition to the more than 100,000 square foot warehouse located behind the building, AM&A had a huge footprint in Buffalo's central core.

However, since 1994, the building has sat largely vacant. It was sold to Bon Ton in the mid-90s and had a short life as a women's department store in 1998, but otherwise, the behemoth has been a pretty big eyesore for downtown.

Ed Nice Jackson

While there were plans to convert the building into an upscale hotel, those plans have not materialized, and according to the foreclosure lawsuit, millions of dollars are owed on the property, and the exact ownership chain of the building is very cloudy.

As things stand today, a foreclosure hearing is scheduled for April.

10 Cities With Rising Foreclosure Rates

"To make some sense of what's going on with foreclosures, we ranked metropolitan areas with high and growing foreclosure rates by comparing June 2023 ATTOM data to May 2023 and June 2022 to see where the foreclosure rate is rising month over month and year over year. Then we ranked these metros based on the current foreclosure rate. We selected only one metro per state."

Gallery Credit: Kyle Matthews

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