History
Walden Galleria was developed by The Pyramid Companies, a New York-based shopping center management firm. Built on a site near Exit 52 of the New York State Thruway, the mall was opened in 1989. At the time, the mall featured six anchor stores: national chains JCPenney, and Sears, regional chain Bonwit Teller, and three Buffalo-based chains: Sibley's, L. L. Berger, and The Sample. Sibley's opened in late 1988, several months before the rest of the mall. An additional anchor space was originally built for B. Altman and Company, but it remained vacant, as the chain decided not to open the Walden Galleria store due to credit restraints. At the time, the two-story mall also featured more than 150 stores, as well as a theater owned by Hoyts Cinemas.
In 1990, Sibley's parent, May Co., merged operations with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Kaufmann's. That same year, local chain AM&A's (Adam, Meldrum & Anderson Company) moved from the nearby Thruway Mall into the space originally planned for B. Altman. The owner of the Thruway Mall sued the AM&A's chain, claiming breach of contract; the chain would later be declared liable for damages to the Thruway Mall, which was subsequently torn down and rebuilt as a strip mall in the early 1990s. Finally, Hoyts sold the Walden Galleria theater complex to General Cinemas by the end of the year.
L. L. Berger declared bankruptcy in 1991, closing all of its stores. Later that same year, three more anchor stores are added to the mall: Lechmere, Loehmann's, and Lord & Taylor. The Sample closed in 1991, and was soon replaced with Linens & Wares, a household goods-based retailer; also, by the end of the year, Filene's Basement would open in the former L. L. Berger space. Both Filene's Basement and Loehmann's would close within three years.
Read more about this topic: Walden Galleria
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)