Some malls get a second life as apartments. Others get bulldozed for parking lots.
The former Seneca Mall in West Seneca, NY is getting something a little more unexpected: a Costco.
Town Supervisor Gary Dickson confirmed that plans have officially been submitted to the West Seneca Planning Board, with Costco stepping in as the anchor tenant for the massive 56-acre site, according to a report from WKBW.
The board is set to review the proposal at its next meeting on August 13, and if things move forward as expected, it’ll close out one of Western New York’s longest-running “what’s happening to that place” mysteries.
To understand why this news is such a big deal locally, it helps to know just how long this site has been sitting empty.
A mall with more history than most malls get
Seneca Mall closed its doors all the way back in 1994, and the story of what came next is a little more complicated than “empty lot for 30 years.”
A Tops Markets and a Kmart both moved into the space after the mall came down, but even that chapter eventually closed, with the Kmart shutting for good in 2019.
Since then, the property has sat mostly dormant, watched over by a town that’s been publicly frustrated with the pace of redevelopment for years.
Dickson himself has previously described the site as an eyesore, and locals have been trading rumors about what might eventually fill it for months.
The Benchmark Group, which purchased the property back in 2024, is the developer now leading the charge to finally turn things around.
Why a Costco, and why here
This wouldn’t just be another Costco.
It would mark the second Costco warehouse in all of Western New York, following the region’s first location opening in Amherst later this October.
For a company that typically opens locations sparingly and strategically, landing two in one metro area within the same year says something about how much retail demand exists in the Buffalo suburbs right now.
The scale of the project matches the ambition behind it.
Plans call for roughly 500,000 square feet of retail space, plus developer-funded upgrades to the surrounding road network at Ridge Road and Slade Avenue to handle the traffic a warehouse club of this size tends to bring.
Dickson has said the full build-out could take several years to complete in phases, so this isn’t a “grand opening next spring” situation, it’s the start of a much longer transformation.
The bigger pattern here
This isn’t happening in a vacuum either.
Dead and dying malls across the country have increasingly become prime real estate for big-box retailers and mixed-use developers looking for large, already-cleared parcels with existing infrastructure nearby.
Costco in particular has shown a pattern of eyeing former mall sites and vacant big-box anchors, since they tend to come with the acreage and highway access the chain needs for its warehouse format.
For West Seneca specifically, this also fits into a broader Southtowns growth story.
The town sits just a few miles outside Buffalo proper, and a project of this size could bring both jobs and a meaningful new tax base to a stretch of Erie County that’s been waiting for a win for a long time.
What happens next
The Planning Board’s August 13 meeting is the next real checkpoint, and it’s happening at the West Seneca Community Center and Library.
Given how long this site has sat in limbo, plenty of Western New York residents will be watching closely to see if this is finally the plan that sticks.
So stay tuned for more updates as it rolls out.