I seem forsaken and alone,
I hear the lion roar;
And every door is shut but one,
And that is Mercy’s door.
- William Cowper, “The Waiting Soul”
The lions of 757 Seneca Street, looming sentinel over the urban scene from the first story of the Kamman Building, are potent symbols of protection, prosperity, and resurrection.
The lion mask, a frequent symbol in classical Greco-Roman architecture, makes a reappearance in the Kamman Building, a Romanesque Revival, four-story apartment and retail block constructed in 1878 by Henry Kamman, the owner of one of East Buffalo’s largest slaughterhouses.
In classical Rome and Greece, the lion mask stood for Leo the Lion, the fifth astrological sign of the Zodiac and a symbol of the prosperity of the Egyptian rainy season. In the tropical zodiac, the sun passes over the Leo constellation from roughly July 23 to August 22 when the River Nile rises, the growing season is at its peak, and lions are known to leave their desert haunts for the banks of the Nile to find relief from the heat in the waters of the inundation.
Charles de Kay, writing in Architectural Record in June 1906, compares the gargoyles of the Gothic abbey to the lion mask of classical provenance: “The only parallel among the Greeks and Romans was the lion mask that decorated the roofs of temples or sprouted water into the fishpond or bath. But that also can be traced back to superstitious origins, for the lion mask, like the mask of Medusa and the head of the griffon, represented talismans to protect men from various ills.”
Locally, lion masks are employed as architectural symbols in corbels at the Webb Building, as mantelpiece ornamentation in the Lockwood House, and on door knockers of the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society. With the Kamman Building, the Hydraulics enjoys its own example of this characteristic classical reference.
The lion is also a symbol of the Resurrection in Christian theology, frequently found in ecclesiastical architecture and occasionally appropriated in buildings of a secular character. The lion as symbol of resurrection is particularly apt for the long-dormant Kamman Building, which is set to be renovated by the architecture firm of Chaintreuil Jensen Stark for its Buffalo headquarters.
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