DescriptionOld Post Office, Ellicott Street and Swan Street, Buffalo, NY - 52675039596.jpg |
English: Built in 1897-1901, this Gothic Revival-style six-story building was designed by James Knox Taylor, William Akin, and Jeremiah O'Rourke to house the main Post Office for the city of Buffalo. The building served as the city’s central post office facility until 1963, when it was replaced by a larger and more modern warehouse-like facility in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood on the opposite side of the railroad tracks from Buffalo Central Terminal. The building housed various federal offices during the 1960s and 1970s before it became home to the City Campus of SUNY Erie, the local community college, in 1981, after adaptive reuse under the direction of Cannon Design. The building is clad in gray Maine Granite with a 244-foot Flemish Gothic tower above the entrance, a hipped roof covered in green terra cotta tile, wall formers, decorative stone and metal finials, decorative gargoyles at the corners of the building and the tower, gothic arched window bays, including one on each face of the upper section of the tower, a decorative cornice at the base of the fifth floor, a large central atrium covered in a translucent roof, window bays with doric pilasters between them on the centers and ends of the building, porches at the entrances with decorative piers topped with pinnacles, with arches between them and gabled parapets with tracery above, first floor paired windows with engaged columns and tracery, and a large cast iron rear canopy at the service dock. The interior lobby features stone-clad walls, corinthian pilasters, vaulted ceilings, a large covered six-story atrium wrapped by arcades, staircases with decorative railings, a mosaic tile and terrazzo floor, and decorative wooden paneling. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and presently houses classrooms, lecture halls, and offices for SUNY Erie. |