Cottage Street
Thomas Day owned the
land on which Cottage Street was built, from Maryland to Hudson Streets. It was conveyed
to him by the State of New York in 1828, and he sold it to Alanson Palmer in 1835.
Palmer subdivided it and sold it as lots.
Cottage Street once exemplified its name. A sleepy suburban lane at the mouth of
Thomas Day's Park, it boasted a dotting of sturdy, bright worker's cottages and austere
two-story Italianate
houses with spare stoop entrances and well-tended kitchen gardens. Many of the houses
have survived.
Thomas Coatsworth
Cottage Street became the street of coal kings. The Great
Lakes trade required enormous quantities of fuel and when steamboats converted to
coal, and coal itself became available trade commodity for shipment, men who had
made money selling fuels saw the potential for vast profit.
Thomas Coatsworth's family came to the United States from England via Ottawa, Canada,
in the early 1800s, settling on a large farm to the northeast of the city. Young
Thomas moved into the city of Buffalo during the first flush of its boom days. He
sold wood and later coal to lake shippers, amassing a substantial enough fortune
to buy a retreat of several thousand acres on Grand Island, probably from Lewis Allen.
His fortune flourished in the second great boom after the Civil war, when he purchased
several lake vessels which plied the Great Lakes from iron Mountain to the St. Lawrence.
He became a pioneer in the local grain trade, establishing one of the first waterfront
grain elevators in Buffalo.
49 Cottage St.
49 Cottage is the house that Thomas Coatsworth built for
his bride, Electra, in 1869. An altogether extraordinary structure, the Coatsworth
mansion is an example of Second
Empire architecture taken to the degree of fantasy.
The octagonal tower at the corner of the house rises four stories from the street,
crested with decorative cast iron.
The stone window caps and their carved Eastlake design detailing are notable, as
are the stone quoins which corner the building.
The Neville coat of arms,
under which banner the Coatsworth family served during the War of the Roses, is carved
in stone above the entryway.
Twenty years later, in 1899, Thomas Coatsworth built again, this time a house for
his daughter, at No. 55 Cottage.
- Source: "Buffalo's Brick Italianates: An Allentown
Legacy," by Sonia R. Efron. 1994.
