Buffalo, New York

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You may know Buffalo, NY for its upstate charm and intense winters, but the real story is written in terracotta and gold leaf, in grain elevators and church domes. This is where Louis Sullivan gave the skyscraper its first true modern form, where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style meets basilica domes borrowed from Rome, and where a converted asylum by Frederick Law Olmsted now stands as one of the most unlikely restorations in America. Consider this your loosely plotted route through Art Deco lobbies, candy shop soda fountains, and a few well timed stops for beef on weck (Buffalo’s signature sandwich) along the way. Let’s roll!

Parkside Candy

Opened in 1927 by James and Helen Vastola, who operated it for 56 years before passing it to their son. The sponge candy recipe has remained unchanged since opening day, a closely guarded family secret involving honeycomb toffee dipped in chocolate. During Prohibition, the back room allegedly served purposes beyond candy making, though the family denies nothing and confirms less. The original marble counter, wooden phone booths, and tin ceiling remain intact. The shop still uses some of the same equipment from 1927. Third and fourth generations now run it, refusing to franchise or expand beyond the original location, which is pretty sweet.

3208 Main St, Buffalo, NY 14214

Lake Effect Diner

This 1940s Jerry O’Mahony dining car was restored by a husband and wife team who discovered it rotting behind a junkyard in Orchard Park. The original diner operated in Mahopac, New York, where it served commuters and locals until the 1980s. Jerry O’Mahony built over 2,000 diners between 1913 and 1956, but sadly fewer than 200 survive. After restoration, Lake Effect Diner reopened in Buffalo’s Larkinville neighborhood in 2012. The menu includes the deliciously titled garbage plate: a pile of everything on one dish, invented in Rochester and perfected here.

3165 Main St, Buffalo, NY 14214

North Park Theater

The last of Michael Shea’s Buffalo theater empire opened on November 21, 1920, and the Buffalo Evening Times said its beauty rivaled any opera house in America, a claim backed up by six Art Nouveau murals from Raphael Beck, painter of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, wrapping the proscenium and layering across a five-panel dome. The Art Deco marquee arrived two decades later in 1941 and kept the “Shea’s” name lit long after Shea himself died in 1934, having built a theater chain across Western New York. Decades of tobacco stains buried the murals and a concrete panel hid the stained glass until 2013, when a defense attorney and a restaurateur spent eight months restoring both, the same theater where Vincent Gallo premiered Buffalo ’66 in 1998, the hometown kid returning to screen a movie about never leaving Buffalo, inside a building that never left either.

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1428 Hertel Ave, Buffalo, NY 14216

AKG Art Museum

Former President Millard Fillmore helped incorporate it in 1862, which makes the Buffalo AKG America’s sixth-oldest public art institution and possibly the only one co-founded by a president hardly anyone remembers (sorry, Millard). The Greek Revival building opened in 1905, four years late for its original purpose as the Pan-American Exposition’s Fine Arts Pavilion. When sculptor Marisol died in 2016, she left the museum everything: over 100 sculptures, 300 works on paper, and thousands of photographs. The 2023 expansion cost $230 million, the largest capital campaign for a cultural institution in Western New York history. That’s roughly 3.8 million admission tickets; but who’s counting?

1285 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, NY 14222

Richardson Hotel

Construction began on the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane in 1871, and by 1880 the eastern wing opened to patients, with the western half not finished until 1895. H.H. Richardson designed the Romanesque towers, Frederick Law Olmsted laid out the grounds fresh off finishing Central Park, and Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride supplied the theory that light and airy corridors could heal what medicine couldn’t. Built for 600 patients, the asylum operated for nearly a century before closing in the mid-1970s. The buildings sat empty until preservation work began in 2006. Today the site is The Richardson Hotel, an 88-room property with a conference center and the Buffalo Architecture Center attached, and a National Historic Landmark that spent its first hundred years trying to cure people and its second trying to get good reviews.

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444 Forest Ave, Buffalo, NY 14213

The Mansion on Delaware Avenue

Built in 1869 for merchant Dexter Rumsey, who lost his fortune in the Panic of 1873 and had to sell. By 1886, it belonged to Butler Mitchell, whose son went on to become a brigadier general. The mansion cycled through families until 1920, when it became the Saturn Club, a private gentlemen’s club where membership required proper pedigree and deeper pockets. The Saturn Club relocated in 1962, and the mansion transformed into a restaurant, then a boutique hotel, hosting George Clooney (allegedly).

414 Delaware Ave, Buffalo, NY 14202

Electric Tower

Built in 1912 based on an earlier Electric Tower constructed for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, which was only temporary and demolished shortly after the fair ended. The design drew inspiration from the Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. For nearly a century, this was where you paid your electric bill and bought vacuum cleaners and lightbulbs. People still occasionally show up looking for customer service or to pay an electric bill, over two decades after the power company left.

535 Washington St, Buffalo, NY 14203

Buffalo City Hall

Ground broke on Buffalo City Hall on September 16, 1929, and by November 1931 the $6.85 million tower stood complete, dedicated the following July for the city’s 100th birthday. Architect John Wade called the style “Americanesque,” though the building’s real personality shows in its details: 1,520 windows that open inward to skip window washers, council chamber pillars honoring civic virtues instead of politicians nobody could agree on, and a passive cooling system that channels Lake Erie wind through the basement with no electricity at all.

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65 Niagara Square, Buffalo, NY 14202

Ellicott Square Building

Built in less than one year for $3.5 million, the Ellicott Square Building was the world’s largest office building from completion until 1908. Brothers Mitchell and Moe Mark opened the world’s first dedicated movie theater here in October 1896, where people paid 3 cents to watch one-minute clips. The mosaic floor was added in 1930, created from 23 million individual pieces of Italian marble. During World War II, the German consulate inside tried to demand removal of symbols from the floor. In 1971, the terracotta cornice was removed, followed by most of the forty lion heads.

295 Main St #700, Buffalo, NY 14203

Guaranty Building

Four days before Hascal Taylor’s death, a judge declared him “insane” and “mentally unbalanced,” so the Buffalo oil magnate never saw his dream building begin construction. In 1893 he’d commissioned Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan to build the “largest and best office building in the city,” envisioning an office tower, hotel, and opera house wrapping an entire city block. The Guaranty Construction Company acquired the plans after his death and completed Buffalo’s first skyscraper in 1896, wrapping Sullivan’s revolutionary steel frame in fireproof terra cotta carved with his signature seed of life motif. By 1898 Guaranty had defaulted and Prudential Insurance refinanced the mortgage, which is why both names still sit above the entrances.

140 Pearl St, Buffalo, NY 14202

Shea's Performing Arts Center

This is the only surviving theatre interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, yes, that Tiffany, the glass maestro who pivoted from lamps to lobbies. Built in a year and a day, it opened in 1926 as “The Wonder Theatre,” the jewel in Michael Shea’s entertainment empire, which began with a single Buffalo music hall in 1882 and grew as far as Toronto. The budget ballooned from $1 million to almost $2 million, at a time when a Model A Ford cost $1,000. The theater debuted on January 16, 1926, with the film King of Main Street. It closed in 1975 facing demolition, until The Friends of Buffalo Theatre secured its spot on the National Register of Historic Places and launched a restoration that has since topped $30 million (that’s a lot of Model A’s!).

646 Main St, Buffalo, NY 14202

Hook & Ladder #12

In 1813, British troops burned the Village of Buffalo during the War of 1812, leaving one house standing. The rebuilt village’s answer was civic-minded and slightly medieval: every homeowner had to keep leather buckets on hand, and any fire became everyone’s problem, fought by a hand-to-hand bucket brigade until it burned out or won. The city got its first real equipment in 1831, two hand pumpers and 200 feet of hose, plus a ladder truck later that year that gave the Hook & Ladder companies their name. Hook & Ladder #12 went up in Black Rock in 1913, all red brick and stepped Flemish gables, and stayed in service for 92 years before disbanding in 2005. It is privately owned today, marked its 105th anniversary in 2018, and still stands in a city that learned early just how fast things can go up in smoke.

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395 Amherst St, Buffalo, NY 14207

Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens

Built in 1897 for $130,000, the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens opened as the ninth-largest conservatory in the world. One of only two tri-dome conservatories in America, the other being the New York Botanical Garden, because why have two domes when you could have three? Its first director spent decades exploring the Americas and Caribbean, mailing back seeds like botanical postcards. The city tried to demolish it in 1929, then again in 1979. Erie County swooped in and purchased the conservatory plus 11.4 acres for one dollar. Dinosaur topiaries arrived in 2001, because nothing says botanical gardens like extinct reptiles sculpted from shrubbery.

2655 South Park Ave, Buffalo, NY 14218

Our Lady of Victory National Shrine & Basilica

Father Nelson Baker raised $3.2 million during the Great Depression to build Our Lady of Victory National Shrine & Basilica, funded largely by his mail-order mission that shipped religious medals and holy water nationwide. Baker ran an orphanage, a hospital, a maternity home, and a boys’ home, all while orchestrating what became one of America’s most successful religious fundraising operations. The dome rises 165 feet and required 8,000 tons of marble. When it opened in 1926, it seated 1,800 people and cost more than any other church built in America that decade.

767 Ridge Rd, Lackawanna, NY 14218

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AWA, Vol. 2 (2024)

AWA, Vol. 1 (2020)

Postcards

Puzzle

Parkside Candy

Lake Effect Diner

AKG Art Museum

The Mansion on Delaware Avenue

Electric Tower

Ellicott Square Building

Guaranty Building

Shea's Performing Arts Center

Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens

Our Lady of Victory National Shrine & Basilica

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