McKinley Mall in Hamburg, New York, came in on a close vote. In 1981, the town's voters gave up a piece of park land for it. One campaign ran on jobs and tax money. The other called itself Consolidated Residents Against McKinley Mall.
By 1989 it was taking stores from an older mall. Sibley's left Seneca Mall, less than five miles away, and reopened at McKinley, and JCPenney did the same in 1991. By the mid-1990s a department store filled every major space in the building.
Then the department stores began to go. Macy's closed in 2016 and Bon-Ton in 2018, the year foreclosure began. Sears closed in 2020.
In 2021 a court let the mall be sold for $8.5 million over the town's objections. It had been valued at $56.5 million in 2014. Its doors are open, and JCPenney is the last department store trading there.
Park land on the ballot
In 1981 Hamburg's voters got the final say over a stretch of town park land at McKinley Parkway and Milestrip Road.
Under a proposed exchange, part of the land would remain a park and the rest would go to a developer for a regional shopping mall.
Two organized campaigns took sides. Taxpayers for a Great Hamburg ran on the jobs and tax money a mall would bring.
CRAMM, short for Consolidated Residents Against McKinley Mall, ran on the park land the town would give up and on what it would cost Hamburg to serve a shopping center drawing from the whole region.
The swap passed, 10,122 votes to 8,134.
Clearing the way took one more land deal, in the spring of 1984.
Sears and AM&A's (Adam, Meldrum & Anderson Co.) had been lined up as the first big tenants by then, and in July 1984 construction started on the former park land.
Under the environmental review for the project, the Hamburg Town Board kept the power to approve later changes at the site.
The stores Seneca Mall lost
In April 1989 Sibley's closed its store at Seneca Mall and opened at McKinley.
It joined L.L. Berger, which had opened a 40,000-square-foot store at McKinley the year before.
Walden Galleria, a larger mall, opened in Cheektowaga that same year, about ten miles north of McKinley.
Within roughly a year of the Galleria's opening, Seneca Mall had lost four of its stores: Sibley's, The Sample, Kleinhans, and JCPenney.
Sibley's had moved to McKinley, and JCPenney opened there in 1991.
The chains spent the early 1990s changing what those stores were called. Sibley's became Kaufmann's in 1990.
L.L. Berger's chain closed in 1991, and its McKinley store reopened as Kaufmann's Home in 1994, the year Bon-Ton bought AM&A's and put its own name on the store that had opened with the mall.
By 1994 the mall had five department stores: Sears, JCPenney, Kaufmann's, Kaufmann's Home, and Bon-Ton.
Opening day on McKinley Parkway
That spring 1984 plan had set the opening for June 1985.
It slipped into the fall, and McKinley Mall opened on October 7, 1985, as a single-level enclosed shopping mall at McKinley Parkway and Milestrip Road in the Town of Hamburg, New York, just south of Buffalo.
AM&A's and Sears were two of its department stores. The Sample was another, and 75 tenants opened in all.
Less than five miles away stood Seneca Mall, an older center with department stores of its own, competing for the same Southtowns shoppers.
General Cinema opened a six-screen theater at the mall's south end in 1986, its first full year of business.
Doors onto the parking lot
Through the 1990s and 2000s, big stores went up on their own lots around the mall, Home Depot, BJ's Wholesale Club, and Wegmans among them.
Shoppers walked into each of them straight from the parking lot.
In March 2004 the mall's new owner, Stoltz Management, brought a plan to the Hamburg Town Board, and the board approved it.
The plan called for rebuilding the center court, moving the food court toward the outside of the building, adding a children's play area, and giving new stores facades and entrances of their own on the exterior.
It also proposed an addition of nearly 69,000 square feet, most of it service space, on part of the parking lot, set against a mall of nearly 800,000 square feet.
Best Buy and Bed Bath & Beyond opened in the Sears wing in 2006.
Both stores pushed their fronts out past the mall wall, and Best Buy had one entrance from the lot and another from the mall corridor.
Barnes & Noble opened in 2008, and in 2011 Old Navy moved into an enlarged south entrance built for it and two other tenants, with a west-facing door to the lot as well as an entrance inside the mall.
Macy's, Bon-Ton, and Sears close in four years
In January 2016 Macy's announced it would leave McKinley, and both of its stores there, the main Macy's and Macy's Home, closed that year, emptying two large spaces at once.
They had carried the Macy's name since September 2006, when Kaufmann's and Kaufmann's Home were converted to Macy's stores.
Bon-Ton's parent company liquidated in 2018, and the store that had opened as AM&A's closed with the rest of the chain.
By June 2018 the mall's loan was delinquent. Foreclosure proceedings began in July 2018.
Sears, the last of the original department stores, closed in February 2020.
The part of the mall that secured its mortgage had been 96 percent occupied at the end of 2017.
At the end of 2020, with Sears gone and the foreclosure unresolved, it was 41 percent occupied.
A sale the town fought
The mall survived the foreclosure and the COVID-19 shutdowns.
In August 2020 the Town of Hamburg hired outside lawyers, because the pending foreclosure was blocking its efforts to deal with the property.
In May 2021 the town changed the rules for the site.
A new local law let the Town Board grant zoning incentives, such as greater density or a mix of uses, in exchange for public benefits like parks, road work, community facilities, or the reuse of parts of the mall.
Under it, housing, health care, and entertainment could come to the mall property if the board accepted what an owner offered in return.
A buyer appeared in June 2021, when Kohan Retail Investment Group agreed to buy the mall for $8.5 million.
The town and Benderson Development both objected.
The town questioned the buyer's financing and the way the mall had been marketed, and Benderson said it would have paid $10 million.
In July 2021 State Supreme Court overruled the objections, and Kohan completed the purchase later that year.
In 2014 the same property had been valued at $56.5 million.
An auction with no sale
On July 23, 2023, Food Court Skatepark opened in a former Mattress Firm near Bed Bath & Beyond. Building it took more than six months.
The finished park was 15,000 square feet, with its own rear entrance from outside, and it was made for skateboards, scooters, inline skates, and quad skates.
It joined the indoor sports, children's activities, and local sellers already filling space in the mall during Kohan's ownership.
The mall itself had gone up for auction online that May, after the April date first set for it was pushed back.
Bidding ended at just under $8 million, below the $8.5 million Kohan had paid in 2021, and no sale followed.
A deal with Benderson Development was discussed late in 2023, and by March 2024 it was off.
Summit Properties USA became the mall's full owner and its manager in 2024.
Dipson closes the six-screen cinema
On July 27, 2025, Dipson Theatres closed the cinema at McKinley, ending nearly four decades of movies at the mall.
The theater had six screens from its first show to its last. General Cinema opened it in 1986, and JCPenney's 1991 store was built near it.
After General Cinema went bankrupt, the theater passed briefly to AMC, and Dipson bought it in 2003.
By the time the screens went dark, the dispute over the theater had already reached a courtroom.
In February 2025 the mall was being sued over failures of the heating and air-conditioning system that served the theater.
What keeps McKinley Mall open
McKinley Mall is open, and Summit Properties USA owns and runs it. Its anchors are JCPenney, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, and Old Navy.
Around them, more than 40 businesses and groups have space in the mall.
Many are local shops, and space built for retail also holds a martial arts school, children's play, fitness, and community groups, with names that run from Red Dragon School of Martial Arts to KidzBounce and WNY Garden Railway.
Two court cases are pending. One is Dipson's lawsuit over the cinema, which has been closed since July 2025.
The other began in July 2026, when the mall's owner went to court to challenge the town's $4.1 million assessment of the property.
The mall stays open to shoppers while both go on.
The 2021 incentive zoning is part of the town code.
The Town Board, which has approved changes at the site since the mall was built, can open the property to the uses that law allows whenever an owner offers a public benefit the board accepts.
By the mid-1990s a department store held every major space in the mall. JCPenney is the only one trading there today.
At Food Court Skatepark, skateboarders and scooter riders roll through what used to be a mattress store.
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