Toronto is full of beautiful property to choose from. Whether you are looking for a house, a loft or a stylish condo, there is a chance for everyone to find their ideal varienton the market of toronto condos, so exciting and so prestigious.

Living in Toronto is great in terms of economy, education, security, culture and arts. It’s a modern city full of attractions of different kinds and it’s easy to enjoy it. Property acquisition is a statement of status so if you are about to embark on your perfect home search look around at north york condos situated next to the lake and the park. There are restaurants and entertainment nearby and it’s only a very short ride to downtown. Read the rest of this entry »

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
- John Greenleaf Whittier, “Maud Muller,” 1856
The Wagner & Nauland Block, a composition of two Italianate commercial structures at 742-748 Seneca Street, was demolished in the late 1990s. Was it necessary?

This photograph, taken at about 1979 by Black Rock activist Scott Glasgow, shows the block in its final iteration as Mindy’s Home Service, a used appliance store that occupied the site into the mid-1990s. The heritage structures, which would have finely complemented the streetscape of any city, were reportedly in good repair at the time of their demolition, only a few years before the 2002 rehabilitation of the Larkin Terminal Warehouse, 500 feet away, shattered misconceptions about the potential marriage of preservation and economic development in Buffalo’s “near downtown.” Read the rest of this entry »

The handsome three-story commercial structure at 738 Seneca, now vacant but secured, was the longtime home of the Hydraulics branch of the Marine Trust Bank, which occupied the building in 1919. The building, constructed in 1900 to house Henry Schaefer’s grocery, was designed by architect Joseph J. W. Bradney. Architecture firm Mann & Cook headed up the building’s expansion in 1919 when Marine Trust moved to into its first story, and in 1954 the storefront was re-clad in polished stone and a bay window on the second story was removed. For years, a billboard Marine Trust installed in 1927 on top of the building was a landmark of its own accord.

The branch’s establishment at 738 Seneca in 1919 was no coincidence. John D. Larkin, president and founder of the Larkin Company, was also on the board of Marine Trust Bank and almost certainly had a hand in this choice of location to provide an amenity for factory workers and shoppers at the famed Larkin Store. The bank was a fixture in the neighborhood into the 1990s, though under different names. Marine Trust became Marine Midland in the 1960s and then became HSBC in the 1990s. Read the rest of this entry »

The commercial building at 860 Seneca Street is a stand-out, a real keeper. It was built circa 1890 to house Jacob Duchmann’s Carriage Manufactory, a building use that was unusually prevalent on Seneca Street in the Hydraulics.

Carriage factories (“factory,” by the way, is the linguistic stub of “manufactory” and derives from the Latin factor, meaning doer or maker) dotted Seneca Street for a very good reason. Seneca Street, dubbed the Buffalo & Aurora Road, was a veritable highway for carriage traffic from the farming country of southern Erie County into the city. Farmers destined for wholesale groceries and food markets of Buffalo would find convenient respite in taverns, barns, harness stores, and carriage factory and repair shops along Seneca Street. Read the rest of this entry »

So how did it all begin? Buffalo’s rise as an industrial metropolis has origins in the ambitious dreams of financier Reuben B. Heacock, who set out in 1827 to create on the banks of the now-buried Little Buffalo Creek an industrial precinct of prodigious scale, a water-powered mill district he hoped could rival the manufacturing areas of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, England.

The dreams did not come to pass, dashed by financial panic in 1837 and the progression of a new force about town: steam power, which made the canal’s power seem primitive and unreliable by comparison. But the effort was a spark setting off the development of large-scale manufacturing in the city. Heacock’s Buffalo Hydraulic Association, the private investment group that built the Hydraulic Canal from Big Buffalo Creek in Cheektowaga to Buffalo, furnished water power for a mill village the investors constructed that represents the seedlings of Buffalo’s industrial economy. Read the rest of this entry »