Given the age of the houses surrounding the expressway I assume some were only standing a few years until eminent domain came a knocking?
EDIT: a few more details.
The route of the future New York State Thruway (the 90) was fixed in 1944. However, construction on the highway wouldn't begin for about 8-10 more years. A 1946 plan for arterial roads in the Buffalo area set out the approximate route of the "Airline Expressway", what would become the Kensington Expressway. In Cheektowaga, the Airline Expressway was to follow the right-of-way of Maryvale Drive.
Some time in the late 1940s, in the area around where Maryvale Drive crossed the Niagara Lockport & Ontario Power Company transmission line, a developer subdivided the underlying land, and builders put up small starter houses. This happened despite widespread knowledge and press about the planned Thruway and Airline Expressway route, and the location of the interchange between the two. There was strong support for an alternative mainline Thruway route through the East Side of Buffalo, so the routes of Buffalo's future expressway network wasn't 100% certain.
When work began on the Thruway and Exit 52 in the early 1950s. many of the "doll houses" in the right-of-way, still fairly new, were plowed under The houses in the middle of the interchange, fronting on what was then Maryvale Drive, were the survivors. (The site was once part of the huge land holdings of George F. Urban.) Construction wouldn't begin on the Kensington Expressway through Cheektowga until the 1960s, so for about 10 years Thruway Exit 51 was the Maryvale Drive exit.
Elsewhere in Cheektowaga, there were hundreds of existing building lots in the route of the future Thruway. These lots were the result of speculative subdivision during the boom of the 1910s and 1920s. The Depression hit, and Erie County found itself the owner of tens of thousands of lots throughout the region thanks to tax foreclosures. The county gradually sold off the vacant lots, including many in the future Thruway ROW, starting in the late 1930s. (The county lot sales would continue into the 1960s. It's the reason why many of Buffalo's mid-century suburban areas have a grid street pattern -- the lots were created decades earlier.)