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.

The building is actually composed of two structures, one the original at 779-781 Seneca built around 1880, and the other a matching extension at 775-777 Seneca constructed around 1890. As early as the 1960s the connected buildings were at 3 1/2 and 4 stories, respectively, and have since been reduced to two. The ground-level storefront has been filled in with concrete block, a common treatment on many East Side retail buildings that have been repurposed, but the second story reveals evidence of the building’s original design intent.

The Buffalo & Aurora Road, a privately-financed plank road comprising Seneca Street from East Aurora to the city line, channeled a flood of farming traffic that fed the hungry, growing metropolis in the mid-nineteenth century and made these large wholesale groceries possible. Langner, like F. X. Winkler across the street (the subject of a future post), would purchase food in bulk from farmers traveling the route and sell to Buffalo consumers and smaller grocers at wholesale prices.

John G. Langner’s wholesale grocery remained a thriving concern until around 1902, after which the store building was subdivided to house several retail and light manufacturing tenants. In the early 1890s the second, third, and fourth floors of the building housed the Buffalo Glove & Whip Manufactory, one of the nation’s premier producers of leather whips and gloves, while storefronts below over the ensuring years housed a panoply of interesting tenants, including at the Hydraulic Bank (the neighborhood had its own bank until the 1940s), the Seneca Theatre (a storefront nickelodeon established in 1910), a photography studio operated by A. Hillman, Lewis Starsky’s clothing store, and the Hydraulic Branch of the U. S. Post Office, which had a presence in the corner storefront from as early as 1920 to the mid-1980s. The Hydraulic Milling Co. had a factory complex attached to the building along Hydraulic Street from around 1900 to 1920. The Langner Building has some real social history. Imagine, at one time it simultaneously housed a flour mill, movie theatre, and clothing store, a mix of uses that control-freak planners like Robert Moses and Le Corbusier would have called disorderly, but is evidence of a robust urban ecology.

It is amazing to observe the artful intricacies of this building which has stood the test of time and, like so many structures built to last, has been the home to so many disparate uses.

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