Former Seneca Mall site sold for nearly $22 million

That will likely include an anchor tenant that is a big name retailer, according to West Seneca Supervisor Gary Dickson, who has been pushing Pyramid Management Group to sell the 55-acre property.

Once the site of a sprawling mall built in the 1960s, most of the property has been vacant for decades.

“It looks promising,” Dickson said. “I’ll just say that we’ve been down this road before, so we’re cautiously optimistic. It certainly looks like it’s going to work out, but I don’t want to jinx it.”

Pyramid recently sold the property at 355 Orchard Park Road, which has only a 93,000 square foot Tops Markets grocery store left on it, for nearly $22 million.

Amherst developer and real estate management firm Benchmark Streamline purchased 12 vacant parcels that add up to about 48 acres at the site for $7.96 million, according to recent filings with the Erie County clerk’s office. That encompasses most of the property where the former Seneca Mall was located.

Dallas property investment company NS Retail Holdings bought the remaining 7 acres, which houses the Tops and the land where a longtime Kmart was demolished several years ago.

The property is at the intersection of Ridge Road and Slade Avenue in West Seneca, with easy access to the Thruway.

The Seneca Mall, the Southtowns’ main mall from the 1960s to ‘80s, was demolished 30 years ago and became the town’s biggest eyesore, Dickson said. It remained that way when he came into office in 2020, and residents over the years have continued to log complaints about the property’s condition.

“Supervisors for the last 30 years have been trying to get something there,” Dickson said. “It’s going to be very good for West Seneca, and I think everyone is going to be pretty happy about what goes there.”

The town, along with the West Seneca Chamber of Commerce, have been in discussions with this group of buyers for several months. Dickson said he has been meeting with Pyramid – also the owner of the Walden Galleria in Cheektowaga – and putting pressure on the company to develop the property or sell it for at least the past few years.

It was earlier this year that they had a breakthrough and Pyramid seemed willing to sell, Dickson said. The company put the property on the market in June.

“We’re very hopeful,” he said.

West Seneca Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Joe Kirchmyer told The Buffalo News earlier in the year that U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer’s representatives called the town asking for Pyramid’s contact information, and may have done some nudging, as well.

The new property owners would like to get on the agenda with a development plan for the site by the West Seneca Planning Board’s February meeting, so they’ll have to submit paperwork by mid-January, Dickson said. He expects by then the buyers will release the plans for the property.

Dickson declined to say what large retail tenant could be coming to West Seneca to help lead the project.

He said Pyramid had an elaborate plan to redevelop the property for years, but was never able to pull it off. The company came to the town about a decade ago with a plan, but it called for the town to invest heavily in the project.

Also, a few years after the Seneca Mall was torn down in 1994, town officials believed they had a deal to get the property redeveloped, but that fell through at the time.

Pyramid had also sold 1.05 acres of the former Seneca Mall property for $1.5 million to Community Bank, which will remodel and reopen a 2,700-square-foot building – a former KeyBank branch – as a Community Bank. That deal closed in August.