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 »

The former Larkin Building U is being cleaned out by Rogers Foam Corp., the automotive parts manufacturer that bought out the now defunct Par Foam Products, Inc., a competitor. Par Foam Products, which occupied the historic factory complex at 237 Van Rensselaer Street for more than two decades, was closed late last year and its assets are now reportedly being shipped to other plants or discarded.

Larkin Building U is now getting closer by the day to a clean slate, a cleared, highly adaptable structure poised for a new economic purpose. While the future of the building is unclear, its potential becomes even more vividly apparent as the building is vacated. Read the rest of this entry »

This just in! The January emergency demolition of the Sacred Heart School at 198 Emslie Street not only broke hearts, it also broke the bank.

The emergency demolition of the landmark building reportedly cost taxpayers a cool $125,000. Economic return on the investment? Zero. While few doubt the necessity of the demolition in light of its collapsing brick facade and the imminent threat the building posed to human safety, fewer still believe the school’s “demolition by neglect” was inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »

O, boy, what an amazing door! The Larkin O Building, constructed in 1907 as one of multiple additions to the sprawling Larkin factory complex, contains an odd second-story door that appears more like one that would have opened out onto a ground-level sidewalk.

It’s not only an appearance. The door did once face onto a street – the Van Rensselaer Street viaduct, in fact. Until a couple decades ago, this section of Van Rensselaer Street from Roseville to Seneca streets was an elevated viaduct allowing the passage of trains underneath, along the tracks of the Erie Railroad that have since been removed. Read the rest of this entry »

You saw it here first! Rare interior photographs of the Kamman Building at 755-757 Seneca Street, set to be overhauled by a top-to-bottom renovation this year, reveal pre-restoration perspectives of the historic commercial structure only months before construction is set to begin.

The Kamman Building, designed by architect F. W. Caulkins around 1880, has been vacant for more than ten years, but like many structures of its vintage, has held up well against a tide of citywide disinvestment over the past half-century and stands well to benefit from adaptive reuse. Read the rest of this entry »