What was once a huge hub for family, friends, and businesses to connect in ways that shaped the northtowns of Western New York for generations is now just a memory. After years of being just a shell, with just a few remaining stores that were largely lonely and empty, now the once great Boulevard Mall has finally shut its exterior doors for the final time, and people no longer can walk its halls, eat inside its food court, and frequent its retail shops.
Officially opening in 1962, the 904,000 square foot shopping center sat on a sprawling campus along Niagara Falls Boulevard on the border between the Towns of Amherst and Tonawanda, just north of Buffalo. For more than 60 years, people wandered its halls to eat, hang, and shop.
Like most malls in the United States, the rise of online shopping and the inability to recover from the change in people’s shopping patterns led the Boulevard to lock its exterior doors this past week…