When AM&A's opened its department store at Olean Center Mall in 1976, downtown Olean got an enclosed mall beside Olean Creek. In its best years it gave work to more than 1,000 people.
People came for more than shopping. In 1985 St. Bonaventure students spent holiday Sundays browsing the magazines under the Christmas decorations, and in 2017 the stock car show filled the corridors with race cars for the 35th time.
Then the stores went dark one by one, and in 2024 a plan to remake the mall won its approvals.
In 2026 the empty Bon-Ton, the store that replaced AM&A's, is still standing. One of the things holding the plan up is inside the mall itself.
North Union Street cleared for a mall
In the summer of 1972, urban renewal left a stretch of North Union Street in Olean cleared for new uses.
The buildings removed included Bordonaro Brothers and a commercial row occupied by Whelan Wholesale, Crosby Cold Storage, Armour Meat, and Standard Electronics in the former Chiavetta's Hardware.
The remaining piece of the old Luther Manufacturing complex, already empty for several years, was demolished too.
Part of the former Pennsylvania Railroad station canopy still stood nearby.
The cleared ground eventually became parking for Olean Center Mall.
Ground for that mall was broken in 1976.
Farther south, the same street was torn up from May through September of that year while benches and projecting crosswalks were added.
Olean Center Mall went up facing North Union Street from the east, in downtown Olean, New York: an enclosed shopping center on a single level, with Olean Creek running along the property.
It was open for business by 1976, when AM&A's opened a branch department store there.
The owners were Olean Center Mall Associates, a joint venture of the Zamias organization and L'Alcove Castle Inc., and in May 1977 the partners signed a lease with Erie County Savings Bank.
That July the mall's merchants elected officers for an organization of their own.
Bon-Ton takes over as a bigger plaza opens
In 1985 the mall was decorated for Christmas, and St. Bonaventure University students came in to browse the magazines.
A trip downtown to the mall was an ordinary part of college life there, Sunday afternoons in the holiday season included.
By 1990 an arcade called Funway Freeway was trading inside.
The department store on the North Union Street side changed its name in 1994, when every AM&A's still operating became a Bon-Ton.
In 1995 the mall went through a general renovation.
That same year Walmart Plaza opened in the St. Bonaventure and Allegany area, where the old discount-store building on the site had been torn down to make room for a new Walmart.
Its anchors came to include Walmart, The Home Depot, BJ's Wholesale Club, and the AMC Allegany-8 multiplex.
The plaza measured 469,300 square feet. Olean Center Mall measured roughly 320,000.
Car shows and charity drives fill the corridors
The center kept hosting civic and charity events as its retail business weakened.
In March 2011 the American Red Cross and other agencies held the fourth annual Storm the Mall, a family emergency-preparedness day with a blood drive.
A 9/11 memorial blood drive followed that September.
WPIG broadcast live from the mall, food and prizes were offered, and the first 300 people who came to donate received commemorative shirts and pins.
By May 2014 a significant number of kiosks and interior storefronts stood empty.
In the late 2010s the mall held three department stores (Bon-Ton, JCPenney, and Kohl's) and 27 smaller store spaces, and seven of the 27 were available at $10 a square foot, utilities included.
Walmart Plaza was its main competitor by then.
In March 2017 race cars filled the corridors for a weekend as the Olean Center Mall Stock Car Show held its 35th annual edition, with awards for appearance.
In applying for the state's Downtown Revitalization Initiative, the city asked for $500,000 toward a $2.5 million multiplex cinema at the mall's front door on North Union Street.
The cinema did not make the list of funded projects and was never built.
Bon-Ton's liquidation leaves an anchor empty
In November 2017 the Olean Bon-Ton had received no word that it was on the chain's list of planned closings.
That December, Seasons Bookstore & Gifts announced that it would close.
After Bon-Ton went into bankruptcy, the liquidation of its 212 remaining stores was announced in April 2018, and the Olean store was on the list.
Going-out-of-business sales ran through the chainwide wind-down, and by August 2018 the store was closed.
Its 73,017 square feet on the North Union Street side stood empty, and the building was not put to new use.
In December 2018 Sears Hometown announced that its smaller store inside the mall would close in early 2019.
The mall itself changed hands in December 2020, when the Zamias organization sold it to Olean Town Centre LLC, a company controlled by a Rochester developer.
A plan to demolish the Bon-Ton wing
The new owner's plan started with the empty Bon-Ton.
In December 2021 the state awarded Olean Town Centre LLC $2 million toward an $18.5 million redevelopment.
The proposal put 60 senior apartments and ground-floor shops into a wider remake with selective demolition, office space, a new facade, more green space in place of pavement, and stronger connections to North Union Street and Olean Creek.
The city later won a Restore New York award to tear down most of the Bon-Ton and replace the mall's roof and the ceilings and skylights over its common areas.
By the summer of 2024 the plan had grown.
It added three 3,000-square-foot buildings and a 35,000-square-foot building, while about 20,000 square feet of the Bon-Ton would be renovated beside a new entrance.
The property itself was split into six lots.
The housing moved to its own outparcel, where People Inc. planned 60 apartments for a broader workforce mix rather than seniors, and in August 2024 the Common Council approved a 40-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes deal for it, 5-0.
In July 2024 members of the county Industrial Development Agency objected to advancing a project of about $40.2 million at a mall whose assessment had been lowered to $450,000, and the board held off on a hearing.
In August 2024 the agency and the City Planning Board approved the project, with tax breaks of up to about $5.3 million.
Inside, about 20 storefronts sat empty that summer, and the only businesses still open outside the two department stores were a jewelry store, an arcade, and a pizza place.
Most of the Bon-Ton was supposed to come down that fall to make room for the new entrance. The fall of 2024 passed, and the building stood.
JCPenney, Kohl's, and the eminent-domain votes
The two department stores still trading, JCPenney and Kohl's, held rights in old lease and site agreements that restricted changes the owner wanted to make, and KeyBank held such rights too.
Those rights became a major obstacle to the redevelopment, and the city began weighing whether to acquire them through eminent domain.
The Common Council split: a February 2025 vote tied 3-3, and in March 2025 a 4-3 majority set a public hearing.
By January 2026 KeyBank had been dropped from the proposal, and the council voted unanimously for eminent-domain action limited to the rights held by JCPenney and Kohl's.
In April 2026 talks over those restrictions were still going on.
Renna's Pizza, among the longest-serving local businesses in the mall, announced in July 2025 that it was moving to Good Times of Olean on East State Street, and it left that year.
The housing fell through separately. People Inc. did not get the state housing money its project depended on, and it pulled out.
Because the Bon-Ton demolition and the new entrance were bound up with that housing, both stalled with it.
The developer is looking for a new housing partner for a state funding application planned for June 2027, with housing for veterans one idea under discussion.
The mall also lost a bid for Goodwill, which chose the former Valu property on West State Street, and recertification of Olean's levee along Olean Creek has added delay.
No firm date is set for the demolition.
Olean Center Mall is open and mostly vacant.
JCPenney and Kohl's are both trading, and Kohl's has a Sephora inside. The Bon-Ton building stands empty.
At its height, the mall supported more than 1,000 jobs.
Its two department stores now open to shoppers through their own outside entrances, and the enclosed corridor they once faced holds a jewelry store and little else.
Independent Publisher Notice
BestAttractions is an independent editorial publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any location, business, property owner, manager, government agency, or organization described in this article. Comments posted on this page are not forwarded to, reviewed by, or acted upon by any entity mentioned in the article. For official inquiries, complaints, applications, bookings, or other requests, please contact the relevant entity directly through its official website or other verified channels.
