Carl J. Lambein, banker, developer built Southgate Plaza
March 20, 1907—Nov. 4, 2009
Carl J. Lambein, a West Seneca banker and pioneering real estate developer who built Southgate Plaza in the 1950s, died Tuesday in Mercy Hospital. He was 102.
Mr. Lambein grew up in West Seneca, attending a one-room schoolhouse at Seneca Street and Center Road, and Ebenezer High School. He was a graduate of the American Institute of Banking and the Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers University.
He began his 30-year banking career as a clerk at Ebenezer State Bank and rose to the post of vice president before retiring in 1951, when he established his own construction firm. In the 1940s and 1950s, he bought land and developed many homes and subdivisions in and around West Seneca.
Inspired by a plaza he saw on Main Street in Williamsville, he acquired farmland adjacent to Ebenezer State Bank at Seneca Street and Union Road and built Southgate Plaza, one of the first large open-air shopping plazas in the country. It opened in 1955 with the bank as a tenant. He continued as president of Southgate Plaza until his death.
In later years, Mr. Lambein was notable for his generous acts of philanthropy.
In 1985, he gave $3.6 million to Houghton College for development of its West Seneca campus, the largest gift in the college’s history. An earlier gift to the college in 1972 started construction of its Lambein Learning Center.
In 1990s, he donated land on Southwestern Boulevard to the Fellowship Wesleyan Church of Orchard Park for its new worship center.
An avid golfer and devoted Rotarian, he also donated 125 acres on the West Seneca-Orchard Park town line to the West Seneca Rotary Foundation for construction of the Harvest Hill Golf Course.
A charter member of the West Seneca Rotary Club, he twice received Rotary International’s highest honor, the Paul Harris Fellowship Award.
He also was a charter member and past master of West Seneca Lodge 111, Free&Accepted Masons; and a member of the Buffalo Consistory and Ismailia Shrine Temple.
He maintained homes in West Seneca and Naples, Fla.
His first wife, Irma Popp Lambein, died in 1984. He later married Marion Prosser Bainbridge, who survives.
Also surviving are a son, Carl; a daughter, Susan Sztuk; and two stepdaughters, Cynthia Bainbridge and Suzanne Behrens.
Services will be at 2 p. m. Saturday in Ebenezer United Church of Christ, 630 Main St., West Seneca.
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