For nearly a century, one address defined shopping in Buffalo. If you grew up here, you can still sing it: “Shop and save at Sattler’s, nine-nine-eight Broad-WAY!”
A Shoe Store in His Mother’s Living Room
Sattler’s began about as humbly as a business can begin. On March 18, 1889, 17-year-old John G. Sattler opened a one-room shoe store in his mother’s home at 992 Broadway, on Buffalo’s East Side. He hung a bell at the front door, and when it rang, the family would run downstairs to wait on the customer.
Sattler had gotten his start at age 15 working at Eckhardt’s department store on Broadway for $3 a week. Now he was on his own, and he took pride in studying his customers and serving them well. As the business grew, he bought up the properties next door, one by one. In 1900, a larger, modern building went up at 998 Broadway — the address that would become the most famous in Buffalo retail.
Women’s wear came in 1926, and a few years later Sattler’s made the transition into a full-line department store. It pioneered “bargain basement” retailing in the Buffalo area: lower prices than the downtown carriage-trade stores like AM&A’s and Hens & Kelly, in a proud, middle-class, largely Polish and German neighborhood. It became known as the working man’s store — the place where East Side families bought school clothes, holiday gifts, and household goods.
The Store That Jingles Built
What turned a neighborhood store into a Western New York institution was marketing — loud, joyful, relentless marketing.
In the late 1920s, Sattler’s drew crowds with weekly automobile giveaways and high-wire walkers. In 1927, founder John Sattler’s son-in-law, Charles Hahn Jr., took over running the business and hired a young newspaperman named Robert S. Cornelius to run promotions and advertising.
Then came the masterstroke. In 1941, New York City singers Lanny and Ginger Grey wrote what is believed to be the first advertising jingle ever created for a department store — for Sattler’s. Every version ended the same way, with five syllables burned into the memory of generations of Buffalonians: “nine-nine-eight Broad-WAY!”
The singing commercials did what decades of print ads couldn’t. People from all over the city — including the wealthier customers who had never set foot on Broadway-Fillmore — started shopping at 998, buying everything from canaries to thuringer sausage to mink coats. By 1950, the jingle was playing 102 times a week across Buffalo radio stations WBEN, WGR, WKBW, WEBR, and WBNY.
Sattler’s kept the spectacle going. Starting in 1947, it sponsored an annual Santa Claus parade. In 1948, the store was completely rebuilt with escalators and air conditioning. Executives called it “the store that jingles built.”
By 1950, the flagship covered six acres and 365,000 square feet, anchoring the Broadway-Fillmore shopping district across from the Broadway Market. Founder John G. Sattler had died in 1941, at age 70, but his store was just hitting its stride.
Riding the Mall Wave
Like every retailer of its era, Sattler’s followed its customers to the suburbs. The chain opened at Thruway Plaza in Cheektowaga in 1957, Boulevard Mall in Amherst in 1962, Seneca Mall in West Seneca in 1969, and Main Place Mall in downtown Buffalo in 1973, with a Rochester store in 1962–63 and locations in Chautauqua and Olean in 1969.
It also swung big on new concepts. In September 1965, Sattler’s opened a $5 million, 500,000-square-foot home furnishings and food store in an old industrial plant at Elmwood and Hertel avenues, operating as Sattler’s Wonderful World of Food and Home Furnishings City U.S.A. Starting in 1963, it ran eight drug stores as well.
But the mall wave that carried Sattler’s outward was also draining the life from its home base. The Broadway-Fillmore district, once one of the city’s great shopping streets, faded as shoppers drove to the suburbs instead.
The Fall
The big concept store at Elmwood and Hertel closed in 1979. The drug stores closed the same year. Then the parent company, United Department Stores of New York City, filed for bankruptcy.
In 1981, the landmark Broadway store was stripped of the Sattler name. For its final 13 months, it operated as the 998 Clearance Center, selling castaways from the Main Place, Boulevard, and Seneca Mall locations. In 1982, five of the chain’s six stores closed for good, and Sattler’s — in business for 93 years — was liquidated.
The flagship itself lingered a few more years before being torn down in the late 1980s. A Kmart rose on the site; it closed in the early 2000s. Today the corner is largely a parking lot, with a suburban-style Aldi in one corner.
Why We Still Remember
Sattler’s has been gone for more than four decades, yet Buffalonians still know the address by heart. Michael F. Rizzo’s 2007 book, Nine Nine Eight: The Glory Days of Buffalo Shopping, is devoted to it. The jingle still gets sung from memory. And the story still resonates: a teenager with a bell on his mother’s front door built something so woven into a city’s life that its address became a song.
That’s a rise worth remembering — and a fall worth understanding. The store didn’t die because people stopped loving it. It died because the world it was built for — the streetcar neighborhood, the Broadway-Fillmore shopping district, the era when a jingle on the radio could fill a store — changed underneath it.
Shop and save at Sattler’s, 998 Broadway. Buffalo hasn’t forgotten.