Genesee Mall sits on a corner that urban renewal redrew, at Genesee and South streets in downtown Auburn. Beside it, Exchange Street became a pedestrian plaza in the 1970s.
In 1980 a far bigger mall with department stores opened just outside town. The one downtown stayed one story, and by 1990 its suites held a bank branch, a jeweler, a gym, and a training school.
By 2001 it was Genesee Center. In 2017 more than 75 volunteers installed a mosaic portrait of Harriet Tubman on its back wall.
In 2025 and 2026, Auburn planning materials still showed a second story on top of the building, a concept dating to the city's 2017 study. In July 2026 the building itself went on the market, asking $1.75 million.
A jeweler and a bank branch on Genesee Street
In December 1982, George York Jewelers went looking for an experienced watchmaker.
The store sold jewelry and repaired watches, and the watchmaker it had was retiring after 24 years in the trade.
Its address was Genesee Mall, a one-story enclosed mall at 100 Genesee Street, on the corner of Genesee and South streets in downtown Auburn, New York.
That same year Onondaga Savings Bank had a branch in the building and called it the Genesee Mall Branch.
The mall stood in Auburn's urban-renewal district, away from the old row of narrow buildings on Main Street, in blocks whose streets were laid out anew through the 1970s.
Exchange Street, which ran along its east side and linked Genesee Street with Lincoln Street behind the mall, had become a pedestrian plaza in those years.
City offices and the city parking garage were its neighbors.
Auburn Public Theater joined them in 2005, and a corner with those neighbors suited small suites and service businesses.
In 1980 a much larger mall had opened just outside Auburn, in the town of Aurelius.
Fingerlakes Mall was a regional shopping center built around department stores, with food service and large parking fields, and it later added a cinema.
By the 1990s it covered about 400,000 square feet.
With it, the Auburn area had a second enclosed mall, and a far bigger one than the mall on Genesee Street.
Training and fitness tenants fill the suites
In 1987 the savings bank was still running its Genesee Mall Branch, and Suite C went to health-care training.
That March a program run by Stafkings Healthcare Systems was approved for the suite, at 100 Genesee Street, Genesee Mall, and people came to Suite C to train for work in health care.
The mall's name went onto a gym in January 1990, when Genesee Mall Fitness Center, Inc. was incorporated.
By then the building mixed shops, a bank branch, a training school, and a fitness business.
College courses came in too.
The Auburn Teacher Center in the mall was in its first year as an off-campus site for the State University of New York, and in the 1994-95 school year it held two courses in educational administration with 31 registrations.
The gym kept the mall's name through the 1990s. In March 2000 its corporation dropped it and became The Fitness Center, Inc.
Genesee Mall becomes Genesee Center
By July 2001 the building had a new name.
Medical Product Review LLC, a company in one of its suites, gave its address that month as 100 Genesee St, Genesee Center, and Genesee Center became the name the property traded under.
The old name stayed in some addresses all the same: a fitness business, Auburn Nautilus, was writing 100 Genesee Mall by about 2005.
The streets around the building were rebuilt in the same years.
In the early 2000s the city finished a major rebuild of the streetscape along Genesee, State, and Exchange streets, the two streets the center faced among them.
Inside, the suites leaned further toward offices.
In 2004 a dermatology practice was in Suite 108, doctors and other professionals kept practices in the building through the decade, and Stafkings stayed in Suite C. Thurston Law Office was there by the early 2010s.
The property itself changed hands in December 2005, in a $1.6 million deal involving a company named Genesee Mall Prop.
Ten days later it was transferred again, with no price stated, to a company called Genesee Mall LLC.
The owner's name kept the one the building had dropped.
A mosaic on the Lincoln Street wall
Santa came to the center in 2011.
Auburn's downtown Family Fun Day and Holiday Parade ended at Memorial City Hall, and Santa met children at Genesee Center, on a day that also brought a choir performance and the lighting of the city's tree nearby.
Later downtown programs paid for public art, theater improvements, and housing in the blocks around the center, and in June 2017 the back of the building got a public piece of its own.
Over the last weekend of the month, more than 75 community volunteers spent two days installing the Harriet Tubman Memorial Mosaic on the rear wall, the one facing Lincoln Street.
The finished panel stretched 20 feet by 5.5 feet, with a portrait and name plate framed by ceramic work.
Its surface mixed tile and mirror with glass gem stones and ceramic lettering, colored grout, and paint.
Specialists handled the portrait, border, technical work, project management, and frame.
The mosaic was added to Auburn's public-art trail as a permanent stop.
Wild's grows and The Thirsty Pug moves in
The center's suites opened off an inside hallway, and from 2016 several of them went to food, drink, and entertainment.
In August 2016 MindGames Escape Rooms LLC was formed with Suite 109 as its address, and the escape-room business used that suite.
The biggest move came from a frozen-yogurt shop.
Wild For Yogurt had about 1,200 square feet, and in 2017 it shifted along the hallway to a suite nearer the corner of Genesee and South, with about 2,700.
It reopened as Wild's Eats & Sweets, with two rooms for sit-down meals and a separate room for private parties, and the menu put pizza and wings next to the frozen yogurt.
Its grand opening was on November 1, 2017. In the bigger space Wild's added comedy nights and live music, with beer and wine on offer.
By June 2018 The Thirsty Pug was pouring craft beer inside the enclosed center.
It was a bottle shop and a tap room in one: customers could drink a pint or a flight on the spot, order wine by the glass, or carry bottles and filled growlers home.
That same June, Next Chapter Brewpub was announced as coming soon to the center.
It brewed its beer on site, poured other local drinks, and ran the brewhouse with a restaurant serving burgers, paninis, wings, salads, small plates, and pizza from a wood-fired oven.
Live music became a fixture of its weeks, and by 2024 it was also holding trivia nights and concerts.
Shops traded beside the taps.
In 2019 a toy store, 20th Century Toys, traded in the center alongside The Thirsty Pug, which by 2020 had moved out to its own address at 131 Genesee Street, on the same street.
Wild's stayed in its corner that year, selling takeout and delivery through the pandemic.
The Hideout takes over Suite 109
The suites turned over again in June 2025.
Sew Enchanted Alterations opened at 13 South Street, Suite 24, on the building's south side, in the space Dina's Alterations had used, and it still does business there, so the center has an address on South Street as well as on Genesee.
Later that month The Hideout Gaming Center was announced for Suite 109, the escape room's old address, with a July opening.
The Hideout runs there now six days a week, Tuesday through Sunday.
Its schedule includes tournaments and a Wednesday evening hangout from 5 to 7 with Cayuga Counseling Services, and it has announced plans for youth esports.
A manga club met there in July 2026, and in October 2026 players seven to 17 competed in a Hideout ping-pong tournament while other visitors could watch and play games.
The room itself mixes PlayStation 5 and Xbox consoles with retro games, board games, and virtual reality, plus a snack bar and social area.
There is no charge just to walk in and hang out, while play costs $8 an hour.
Monthly memberships are sold for young people, adults, and families, and birthday parties can be booked for groups of up to eight children.
The suites around the central atrium hold food, personal services, and offices.
Bambino's Pizza is in Suite 108, serving pizza, lasagna, cannoli, and coffee, and Mesa Grande Taqueria serves tacos, burritos, quesadillas, nachos, salads, desserts, and margaritas.
Alter Image Salon cuts hair, and so does Ruscio's Barber & Hair Style Shop, on the Genesee and South Street side.
Thurston Law Office is in Suite 7, and Acropolis Realty Group runs a real-estate branch office from Suite 20.
The Harriet Tubman mosaic is on the Lincoln Street wall.
The property is for sale. It went on the market in July 2026 with an asking price of $1.75 million.
The building is still one story at a prominent downtown corner.
Auburn's 2025-26 downtown planning work, aimed at denser mixed-use building, sketched a second story on top of it as a possible infill project.
Stafkings is in Suite C, the suite where its health-care training program was approved in 1987, when the building was Genesee Mall.
The Hideout still puts that name in its address.
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