Edward
Austin Kent was a son of one of the founders of the Flint and Kent Department store
in downtown Buffalo.
A graduate of the former Briggs School in Buffalo and Sheffield Scientific School
at Yale, he studied architecture at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and continued
his studies in England. He later practiced in Chicago as a partner of Joseph
Lyman Silsbee before coming to Buffalo in the late 1880s.
One of the best architects to grow up and practice in Buffalo, Kent designed a variety
of intriguing buildings in Western New York. Carleton Sprague Home (not pictured
above) on the American lake shore in West Hamburg is the best Shingle
style residences in the area.
Not surprisingly, Kent designed his family's department
store, the Flint & Kent Department Store on Main St.
He was 58 years old when he was returning from a two-month
holiday that had taken him to France and Egypt, and was reputedly looking forward
to a comfortable retirement Tragically, he was aboard the SS Titanic -- the only
Buffalonian -- which on April 15, 1912, rammed into an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland
and sank. Just days after the disaster, a letter to Kent's sister from the daughter
of one of the women he assisted recorded his bravery. Moreover, Kent's friend and
fellow first class passenger Archibald Gracie survived to corroborate the story.
A true hero of the catastrophe, Kent went below several
times to alert people to the danger and assist them to the chilly, dark deck. He
was last seen by a woman friend in a lifeboat as he waved from the railing of the
listing vessel.
Incredibly, Kent's body was afterwards recovered from the sea by a ship out of Halifax
and brought there and then to Buffalo, where he lies in the Kent family plot in Forest Lawn Cemetery
where the inscription on his tombstone reads, "Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
See also: Highlights of Buffalo's History,
1896
Sources:
- "Upstairs, Downstairs: Western New Yorkers and
the Titanic," by William H. Siener, in Spring 1998 Western New York Heritage.
- "Designated Landmarks of the
Niagara Frontier," by Austin M. Fox. Buffalo:
Meyer Enterprises, P.O. Box 733, Ellicott Station, Buffalo, New York 14205. 1986.
OUT OF PRINT.
- "Area Landmarks," in the Buffalo News, August
15, 1993
- "Buffalo Architecture: A Guide." Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1981 (Amazon.Com and Barnes
and Noble)
See also: Theatre
Place (UB School of Arch & Planning)
