Niagara County, New York has one major shopping mall, Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls USA. A Second mall, The Summit. is scheduled to close June 2009.
Sears – Opened 1972
The Bon-Ton – 88,100 sq ft (8,180 m2). Opened 1995
Save-A-Lot – 17,000 sq ft (1,600 m2). Opened 2008
The Summit (formerly the Summit Park Mall) is a 800,000 square feet (75,000 square meters) shopping mall located in Wheatfield, New York, about seven miles (11 km) from
the Falls and from Canada. The mall opened with great fanfare in 1972 and then expanded in 1979, with 5 large anchor tenants: Sears, AM&A’s, later purchased by The Bon-Ton, Hens & Kelly, a 30,000 square feet (2,800 m2) Child World, later purchased by Toys "Я" Us, and Jenss. There were also two midsized tenants McCrory & Co and The Sample Shop. The mall did extremely well through the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s.For a brief time Macys operated MCO (Macys Closeout) in the former Hens & Kelly space. But in the early ’90s the regional department store Sample Shop closed, the value of the Canadian dollar began to drop, at the same time as the advent of power centers, category killer big box stores, and Wal-Mart’s expansion; these factors combined to slaughter the malls of the 1970s and ’80s. In 1998 regional department store Jenss left the mall and the space remained vacant until 2005.
