Campanile

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-operatlively 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.