Robert B. Adam House - Interior photos

Robert B. Adam House
448 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY

Erected:	1876
Architect:	Cyrus K. Porter
Style:	French Renaissance Revival
Original Owner:	Robert B. Adam The Buffalo City Directories list Adam living here from at least 1878-1906.
1972 owner:	Johnson and Wilkens Co., Mortuary
2012 owners:	TRM Architect  (Oct. 2012)
Location:	Allentown Preservation District
See also:	AM&A's

Published in The Buffalo Evening News, January 8, 1989 Robert B. Adam   ...........Allentown Historic District

Is Cyrus K. Porter the architect of 448 Delaware Avenue? No Cyrus K. Porter business papers or plans & drawings are known to survive, so we are out of luck in that regard.  The The Buffalo History Museum has a small collection of Robert B. Adam papers but they all concern the AM&A’s department store.  A few items in other repositories concern his rare book collecting hobby.  I was not able to find any surviving collections of personal papers.   Your page at BuffaloAH.org attributes the Adam house to Cyrus Porter and cites one of the Larry McIntyre “Area Landmark” drawings from the Buffalo News.  Thank you thank you thank you for citing a source! So I wondered: how did Larry come by this attribution a hundred+ years after the fact?  Larry is now deceased so we cannot ask him.  Perhaps it was on stylistic grounds, but any architect can borrow design elements from any other.   I thought maybe Larry consulted Frank Kowsky’s essay on Delaware Avenue in Grand American Avenue (1994). But Kowsky does not mention the Adam house.  Nor does Edward Dunn in his Delaware Avenue book (2003).   I scoured Google Books, because a good, though hardly comprehensive, selection of 19th century architecture & engineering trade journals are now online there in full text.  These often carried what I’ll call Building Intelligence columns, with notices of firms landing notable commissions.  And, of course, there were feature stories on major new buildings.  No luck.   I used our Buffalo newspaper search engine in the hopes of finding some mention of the Adams house with Porter, but no luck.  Here is more about that search engine, which anyone may use:   https://buffalohistorymuseum.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/buffalo-newspaper-custom-search-engine/   I looked at the (scant) clippings on Adam and Porter at The Buffalo History Museum and did not find anything linking them.  Porter’s obituary does not mention this house.   The Buffalo Common Council proceedings of 1875 & 1986 do not mention any building permits issued to Porter or Adam, though the requirements for obtaining a permit were probably much more lax then than now.  Unlike today, plenty of stuff went up without permits. - Cynthia Van Ness,    Director, Library and Archives, The History Museum