She is aging and worn, and her elegance is often overshadowed by the other beauties in a city stockpiled with them.
But now, a face-lift has her turning heads again and reminding anyone who passes by just how striking and magnificent she still is after all these years.
She, of course, is the City Campus of Erie Community College – still referred to as the Old Buffalo Post Office – where ECC began a $10 million project last summer to renew the exterior of the historic Ellicott Street building with:
• A new clay-tile roof.
• Restoration of about 400 windows.
• Mortar repairs to the massive granite building.
On Wednesday, the college showed off the finishing touches to its roof-top restoration.
Hoisted onto the building’s corner towers by crane and mounted in place by workers were four 11-foot-tall copper finials – ornamental pieces that had been damaged and removed from the building about 30 years ago.
“This is one of the last buildings to have all that stuff," said project architect Michael Lennon, of Flynn Battaglia Architects, as he stared up at the building. “They kind of took that out of architecture after this era."
The cornerstone for the building was laid in 1897 for federal offices – including the courthouse, harbor master and post office – at a time when Buffalo was one of the largest cities in the nation. When the building was dedicated in 1901, the first letter posted was to President William McKinley, who later was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.
The Gothic-style building – with its recessed arched openings, carved gargoyles and eagles, and steep gable roofs – earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
“Our churches have this style, but not too many of our public buildings do," said Tom Yots, executive director of Preservation Buffalo Niagara.
“What I like about this building is it’s different than the rest of them, probably because of the time it was built," said Yots, who snapped photos of the crane raising one of the copper finials. “It’s older than City Hall. It’s older than the Electric Tower. This one is very rare, because most of our public buildings – and really monumental buildings – occurred after it."
As the federal offices moved out over the years, the building fell into disrepair and was scheduled for demolition before the community college opened its City Campus there in the early 1980s.
The mammoth structure, with its signature 244-foot tower, encompasses an entire city block, but it sometimes gets lost among Buffalo’s many architectural gems.
“Everyone looks at Main Street, and you got all the big hitters – St. Paul’s, the Guaranty, the Ellicott Square office, even things like M&T Bank," Lennon said. “This is on the edge of downtown, and people don’t come this way as much, so it’s in the background.”
But as the restoration continues into next year, it’s hard to miss the grand old lady these days.
The project was long overdue, but it took several budget cycles for the college to accumulate the $10 million needed for the work, officials said.
“We’re proud of its history and proud to be occupying it," said ECC President Jack F. Quinn Jr.
“It’s almost impossible for us to imagine 30 years ago that this building was threatened and was going to come down," Yots said. “We must use this and what happened here as a model for what can be done."
