The neglected Sacred Heart School, located at Emslie Street and San Domingo Alley and designed by architects Schmill & Gould in 1913, is a victim of the high winds from yesterday’s storm, which contributed to the collapse of its brick, northern-facing wall onto an adjacent lot earlier this morning.

The building is part of a church complex that once housed the German congregation of the Church of the Sacred Heart, Read the rest of this entry »

The smokestack…
‘Tis a poor drizzly morning, dark and sad.
The cloud has fallen, and filled with fold on fold
The chimneyed city; and the smoke is caught,
And spreads diluted in the cloud, and sinks,
A black precipitate, on miry streets.
And faces gray glide through the darkened fog.
- George MacDonald, “A Manchester Poem”

The Larkin Power House smokestack is one of the obelisks of industrial Buffalo. It is one among these quickly-disappearing landmarks that define the city’s character and place in time, in many ways more than the buildings to which they are connected. The smokestack, as symbol of the Machine Age, is fading from memory – and skylines. In December 2006, the Buffalo region lost one of its mighty stacks at Tonawanda’s Spaulding Fibre plant, which at 250 feet could be seen for miles around and was probably the single most important connector to the history of the suburban municipality. The smokestack of the Larkin Power House survives, defying its obsolescence. Read the rest of this entry »

Hidden remnants of beauty are often revealed in unlikely corners of the Hydraulics. The Langner Building is one example where, if one does not pay close attention, one can easily overlook the finer details of this former retail building.

Langner’s, at the corner of Hydraulic and Seneca streets, has been occupied and adaptively reused by the vibrant canvas manufacturing business, Custom Canvas, since the early 1960s.  by German-born, West Seneca politician John G. Langner to house his eponymously titled wholesale grocery in the late 1870s, the Langner Building is one of a few extant retail structures on Seneca Street established after the horse-drawn highway known as the Buffalo & Aurora Road was constructed from East Aurora to Buffalo in the late 1840s. Read the rest of this entry »