Campanile Apartments - Table of Contents
2003 Photos
Campanile Apartments
925 Delaware Avenue
Buffalo, NY
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Erected |
1929 |
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Architect |
B. Frank Kelly |
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Contractor |
Architect-turned-contractor George J. Metzger (See Hayes Hall) |
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Style |
Italian Renaissance Revival |
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Terra cotta ornamentation |
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Delaware Avenue entrance |
Balconet ... Corinthian order ... Keystone |
Terra cotta panels ... Round pediment |
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Terra cotta ornamentation |
Rope molding ... |
Bryant Street entrance |
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Acanthus leaf on rope molding |
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There are 38 apartments; some have three floors, some have terraces, one has eight bedrooms with eight-and-a-half baths. (Source: Classic Buffalo: A Heritage of Distinguished Architecture)This is one of Buffalo's finest Delaware Ave. addresses. Constructed in 1929 just before the stock market crash and the Great Depression, the building was designed by B. Frank Kelly, a Canadian architect who came to the States in 1921 and opened his practice in Buffalo's Ellicott Square building.
His massive building is stately - but not static. Richly dressed in a structural polychrome of brick, limestone, and terra cotta, it is intricately detailed with Italian Renaissance Revival architectural elements. Its roofline is colorfully punctuated with tall caps of red tile rooftops.
The building's original pre-construction sales brochure, published in 1928, advertised a "sound-proof, fire-proof building of co-operatively owned homes," hailing co-operatively home ownership as "the most satisfactory solution of the metropolitan living problem."
Although co-ops are extremely popular in Manhattan, there are only three in the greater Buffalo area. In a cooperative, each owner holds stock or shares in the corporation that owns and manages an entire building. Vested with shares, the owner then engages in a long-term proprietary lease with exclusive rights to use an individual unit. This differs from condominium fee-simple ownership, where an Association owns all of the common elements and the individual owners typically own their unit and its contents. (Source: Barry Muskat, "Fresh Elegance for a Vintage Apartment," in Buffalo Spree, January/February 2004)
83 Bryant Street
83 Bryant is dated 1926 and was built before the adjacent Campanile apartments which followed shortly after. It is a completely separate structure from the Campanile. When conceived in the presentation rendering, 83 Bryant was to be named Lafayette. (Source: Patrick Mahoney, AIA)
Tuscan order
Festoons and rosettes
