University Park Historic District - Table of Contents .......................... University Heights Neighborhood - Table of Contents
Edward A. Diebolt House - Table of Contents
National Register Nomination Excerpt - Edward A. Diebolt House
62 Niagara Falls Boulevard, Buffalo, NY
Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006 Edward A Diebolt obtained a permit to build a frame dwelling, 24x34x18 feet, at 62 Niagara Falls Boulevard on February 8, 1922. The following year, he and his wife Clara were listed in the city directory as residing at their new address. Diebolt, who was vice-president of the John L. Schwartz Brewery on Bennett Street in Buffalo, lived in the house until his death in 1937. When constructed, the Diebolt house was located in an outlying residential area of North Buffalo formerly known as Elysville. The original name of the street on which the house stands was Kenilworth Avenue. (The name referred to the nearby Kenilworth Race Track (postcard).) As laid out for residential development, Niagara Falls Boulevard followed the pattern being established in the early twentieth century for so-called automobile suburbs. Streets in such areas owed their inspiration in large part to the writings of Charles Mulford Robinson, the influential spokesman for City Beautiful urban ideals. The seventy-four-foot right of way includes the roadway paved with red brick pavers, stone curbing, concrete sidewalks sheltered beneath double rows of trees, and Neo-Classical style street lamps. (The present lights reproduce the original lamp posts.) Utility lines were kept out of sight, being strung from poles placed at the rear of the property lines. Mandatory setbacks created a uniform streetscape of single family dwellings, and each 40-foot-wide lot included a drive at one side leading to a garage at the back of the property. In 1987, the Buffalo Preservation Board designated the thoroughfare (but not the houses along it) as a local landmark. The Diebolt house is an intact example of a Colonial Revival dwelling type popular with middle class homeowners in the early twentieth century. Such houses were common in architectural pattern books, magazines, and catalogs of mail-order house companies, such as Sears, Standard Homes Company, Radford Homes, and Bennett Homes. “Neo-Colonial houses,” states Daniel D. Reiff, the scholar of the pattern book and mail-order house movement, “by their fidelity of form and detailing almost copies of actual colonial types—emulating the two-story, three-or-five-bay gabled roofed dwellings of the eighteenth century--begin to appear in popular books soon after 1910.” For a modest charge, national catalog companies sold plans that included a complete list of materials required to construct each dwelling. For $20, one could obtain from the Standard Homes Company of Washington, D.C., a set of blue prints with specifications within a day or two for any house in their catalog. The plans, which were prepared “by architects who devote their entire time to the planning of individual houses,” would come in duplicate, one set for the contractor and one set for the homeowner. And the company guaranteed that the method of construction would meet the building codes of any city in America. The Diebolt house bears an especially close resemblance to Standard Homes’ “Esterbrook,” a three-bay, center entrance, 34-foot wide shingled dwelling with a side porch and an arched entrance porch. However, in order to fit the 34-foot-wide Buffalo dwelling onto the 40-foot-lot and have room for a driveway, the builder positioned the Diebolt house with the three-bay façade paralleling the driveway rather than facing the boulevard. Thus, the Diebolt house, like many others of its type in Buffalo, presents its less important 24-foot-wide side porch elevation to passersby. The driveway provides both pedestrian and vehicular access to the principal, south facing doorway. Making virtue of necessity, the Diebolt house assures those going and coming a more private arrival and departure than would be the case if the principal entrance opened onto the busy street. The Diebolt house also substantially conforms in its plan to the Esterbrook type. One enters the Diebolt house through the central doorway into a vestibule. This, in turn, opens into the “reception hall” area at the foot of the main staircase. The center hall unit is flanked on the east by the living room and porch. As in the Esterbrook, the fireplace in the Diebolt house living room occupies the center of the long outer wall, where those entering the space from the reception hall can see it to advantage. Likewise, in an arrangement similar to the principal floor plan of the Esterbrook, the nearly square dining room and kitchen of the Diebolt house are situated on the western side of the central hall. The garage of the Diebolt house, which was designed for two cars and built of the same materials as the house, is emblematic of the growing importance of the automobile to urban home life in the early twentieth century. Such structures, together with the paved driveway, were a feature new to American domestic architecture at the time. William A. Radford, founder of the Radford Architectural Company, popularized the term “garage” in 1910, when he published the first catalog dedicated to this new utilitarian building type. By the time 1920s, freestanding garages at the rear of the lot terminating a driveway were a standard feature of “better” middle class dwellings. The Diebolt house occupies a site near the middle of a block of similarly scaled, mostly early-twentieth-century residences in various architectural styles. Directly across the street as well as two doors to the south are similar, three bay, central entrance Colonial Revival residences. The conversion of the Erie County Almshouse into the University of Buffalo campus around 1909 was the catalyst for the residential development of Niagara Falls Boulevard and other nearby streets. The former Elysville area henceforth became known as the University Heights neighborhood |