Walmart cited for sore eyes

Category: Preservation

Published Date

Written by Randy Garbin

This comes to us by way of the Buffalo News thanks to a tip by Doug Smith. Apparently, even when Walmart destroys, it doesn't always follow through on its plans to fill the void it leaves. Perhaps this is a mixed blessing, but now the folks in the Niagara region have neither a great roadside attraction nor a soul-crushing place to buy fodder for the landfill.

Bruce Andriatch: Overbuilding is leaving us with eyesores

Pat Bannister fought so hard to prevent Walgreens from building a store in Kenmore that even after the store was built, he vowed to never go in there.

Then one day, he needed to make a purchase, and the store was so close, and . . .

“I broke down,” he said.

But he never became a fixture at the store on Delaware Avenue. Really, no one did. The store wasn’t there long enough.

In most ways, that now-vacant drugstore is no different from the hundreds of empty buildings that dot the landscape across Western New York. But it is a stark reminder that for all their certainty about how great a project will be, developers are no better at predicting the future than anyone else.

That point was reinforced most recently in Evans, where officials were prepared to welcome Walmart to the community. The nation’s largest retailer wanted to build on the site of the former Grandview Drive-In Theater.

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