The Data Center Next Door

Built in 1969, Buffalo's Main Place Mall was intended to help save a downtown already reeling from the steady flight of people and stores to the suburbs. The two-story shopping center, designed by famed architecture firm Harrison and Abramovitz, sprawls out nearly two blocks, cutting off the street grid and anchoring what is now the city's fourth tallest building.

The mall failed to keep retailers downtown, but it did present itself as a respectable, albeit modest, shopping center, conveniently attached via skybridge to what became the city's last remaining department store. When that department store closed in 1995, the mall began to lose stores at a fast pace. Eventually, a glass-enclosed restaurant and nightclub along the tower's base, owned by former NFL star Jim Kelly, closed too.