Twenty-Eight Years and a Court Ruling: What Comes Next for Buffalo's AM&A's Building at 377 Main

On the corner of Main and Washington in downtown Buffalo stands one of the most debated buildings in Western New York — a ten-building complex totaling roughly 350,000 square feet, built in stages beginning in the late nineteenth century as the flagship store of the Adam, Meldrum and Anderson department store. Taylor's Department Store closed its doors there in 1998. In the twenty-eight years since, the AM&A's building has become the city's most prominent symbol of stalled potential: architecturally significant, structurally challenged, and legally paralyzed.

On May 27, 2026, a State Supreme Court justice issued a ruling that may finally begin to change that. As reported by Buffalo Business First, the court annulled the 2020 transaction involving 377 Main Realty, the entity that purchased the building that year, while simultaneously granting that firm 51 percent ownership in Landco, the entity that actually holds title to the property. The decision casts new complexity on the ownership structure — but it also, paradoxically, may be the most progress the building's future has seen in years.

The Ownership Dispute That Froze Everything

The AM&A's building at 377 Main Street had a promising moment in 2020. A developer purchased it from Landco for approximately $2 million and quickly advanced a plan to convert the complex into office space, residential apartments, and ground-floor retail. The City of Buffalo approved those plans. The General Services Administration came close to signing a federal lease for the Social Security Administration and Army Corps of Engineers to occupy space in the project — a substantial anchor tenant that would have made financing realistic.

Then the ownership dispute erupted, freezing everything. For six years, competing claims over who legitimately owned and controlled the building blocked any meaningful progress. GSA moved on. The financing window closed. The building continued to deteriorate.

According to Buffalo Rising's May 2026 deep-dive on the property, Sam Savarino — the court-appointed caretaker of the building and a potential development partner — has described the conditions inside in stark terms. The property requires near-complete reconstruction of the interior, roof replacement, structural repairs to the vault systems beneath Main and Eagle streets, new windows throughout, and wood floor replacement across multiple floors. Remaining asbestos and identified contamination add further complexity and cost.

What the Court Ruling Changes

The May 27 ruling establishes that 377 Main Realty has a defined stake — 51 percent of Landco — rather than the clouded and contested position it had occupied since 2020. Whether the parties can now align around a development path remains the central question.

Savarino told Buffalo Rising he believes there is a path forward if all parties commit to getting something done — the two ownership parties, the judge overseeing the case, the title company, and the City of Buffalo. That is a substantial alignment requirement, but the ruling at least establishes a clearer starting point for those negotiations.

The Financial Puzzle

Even with a resolved ownership structure, the economics of redeveloping the AM&A's building are daunting. The most ambitious prior proposal — a $70 million hotel and apartment plan advanced by developer Rocco Termini in 2009 — collapsed on financing and was never built. The 2020 plan that nearly attracted GSA tenants would have been the most realistic path in years, and it fell apart before construction ever started.

Savarino has identified several tools that could make a new attempt viable. New York State's pending “white elephant” historic preservation tax credit bill, aimed specifically at chronically vacant large historic properties, would be a critical enabler if enacted. The existing brownfield tax credit program could address contamination costs. Private equity and developer equity would need to fill whatever gap remains after public subsidies — and at a building that needs near-complete interior reconstruction, that gap could be substantial.

The 2020 plan's 128,000-square-foot office component plus 33 to 44 apartments gives a useful benchmark for scale. Any future plan would likely need to grapple with similar proportions, and the specific mix of uses — office, residential, hotel, retail — will determine what financing tools are available and what the project pencils out to.

Buffalo's Biggest Redevelopment Opportunity

At 350,000 square feet in the heart of downtown Buffalo, the AM&A's complex represents one of the most consequential adaptive reuse opportunities in Western New York. Its location at Main and Washington places it at the center of the city's transit corridor, steps from City Hall, the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus catchment area, and the existing retail and residential activity along Main Street.

Buildings of this scale rarely sit vacant this long anywhere in the country. The AM&A's building has done so because of the extraordinary convergence of structural challenge, ownership dispute, financing complexity, and shifting federal tenant interest. The May 27 court ruling removes at least one of those obstacles — the most legally intractable one — and places the building at an inflection point it has not reached before.

Whether the remaining parties can convert that inflection point into actual construction activity will be the defining real estate story in Buffalo for the next several years.

Construction Scope and Delivery Considerations

For any general contractor ultimately engaged on an AM&A rehabilitation, the scope is among the most demanding available in Western New York. Structural work on a ten-building complex with shared party walls, sub-grade vault systems beneath active public streets, and decades of deferred maintenance requires exhaustive pre-construction investigation — ground-penetrating radar surveys of the vault network, structural assessments of each building's floor and roof systems, and comprehensive hazardous materials surveys before demolition or alteration scopes can be defined.

The asbestos and contamination identified inside the building adds a regulated abatement phase that must precede interior demolition. In a building of this scale and vintage, asbestos-containing materials can appear in floor tiles, ceiling tiles, pipe insulation, fireproofing, roofing materials, and mechanical systems — all of which require licensed abatement contractors and regulated disposal. Phased abatement sequenced with tenant fit-out is common on large historic projects, but the ten-building configuration and public-street vault interfaces add coordination complexity not present in simpler rehabs.

Historic tax credit projects — which the AM&A's building would almost certainly rely on — also impose National Park Service Part 2 approval requirements governing window replacement specifications, storefront treatments, and interior alterations in character-defining spaces. Those requirements add design and review time to the preconstruction schedule but are non-negotiable if the developer intends to monetize federal Historic Tax Credits.

What to Watch

Three near-term indicators will signal whether the May 27 ruling produces real development momentum: whether the two ownership parties reach a formal operating agreement for Landco that allows a developer to transact; whether New York State advances the pending “white elephant” historic preservation tax credit bill that Savarino has identified as a key enabler; and whether the City of Buffalo re-engages federal tenant prospects or other anchor tenants that could anchor a financing structure. Any one of those three developments would materially change the probability that the AM&A's building reaches construction within the next three to five years.