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Looking Backward: Hotel Buffalo

by / Nov. 16, 2016 12am EST

“Somehow, it seemed to blend with the aura of a city that had risen to great power and wealth, built grain elevators, expanded railroads and cut forests, eventually traveling abroad and returning home to build mansions with a foreign feeling.” –Buffalo Courier Express, December 13, 1967

The Hotel Buffalo was Ellsworth Statler’s first hotel, and perhaps his best. The 13-story, 425-room hotel was built at Washington and Swan Streets in 1908, and demolished in 1968. It was billed by its owners as the most modern in the country—“A room and a bath (signs read) for a dollar and a half”—and was the first ever to offer a bathroom, running water, and a wall-mounted light switch in every room. Clad in polychrome terra cotta tiles arranged in patterns of writhing vegetative forms, “she represented the best of her kind,” according to a 1967 Buffalo Courier Express account. “She was a thing of concrete and steel and fancy gewgaws. A hotel, but what a hotel!”

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