Buffalo Main Street Station

Trying to locate architectural drawings for the Station in Buffalo (at the foot of Main Street). The Station was built around 1917 and demolished in the 1980s as part of the NFTA LRRT project. Just the DL&W Shed remains.

I'm particularly interested in the elevated structure that led freight trains to/from the coal dumper and freight house. This structure went "through" the Skyway and over Main Street.

Tried City Hall - but they do not have plans on file.

The remnant of the elevated structure including the portion that supported the "billboard" at the foot of Main Street was being demolished in early December, 1975. Happenened to be on a job in Buffalo on 04 December and drove down to the station where the demolition work was in progress. Took several photos of the work being done. The demolition concern was utilizing a old-fashioned crane and wrecking ball to reduce the structure.

I thought I had some sketches, but I could only find the attached photo of the freight run around.

I don't think any original drawings of the building or related facilities exist. I did quite a bit of work involving the old DL&W and could not find any resource at all that even gave s hint that any drawings might exist.
As for Not original drawings I made a set of the main passenger building itself only as a college study course in 79. I have hundreds of photos of the entire interior I took at the time as well. The drawings are ink on velum and rolled up in a tube, I still have them but they are brittle being over 30 years old now. I think my pix are all slide or negatives, I don't think I made a lot of prints, I still have all the slides and neds stashed away somewhere.
Someday I plan to get teh drawings transferred to CAD and offer CD discs with the plans, photos etc......doing this is not even on my priority list, maybe I will get to it within the next 5 years anyway. The drawinggs I made were done using not only photos but I spent many many hours measuring the building from the ground to the attic. I did floor plans, elevations and 2 cross section drawings ocv the building 10 or 12 pages of drawings. The plans have too much detail on them and are a little hard to read in places, CAD would be a great assett as the drawings I did were all manuually created and I was under a deadline to complete by the end of the semester so not everything lined up. aving CAD I can put in the exterior walls and openings and add the vertical columns and load bearing partitions and those will remain constants through all the other views and I can build in the details from there. When I made the originals I had to make compoimises from one sheet of drawings to the next so CAD will help fix those irregularities.

The elevated line to the coal dock was long gone byt the time I started to visit the DL&W in 78. Since the trainsheds were supposed to be saved by NFTA I did not do drawings of them but I do have photos. I used to pull pieces of broken NKP and DL&W china out of teh dirt and ballast in the trainshed, managed to glue together oms complete caucers and a cup or two.

I am pretty certain no origianl drawings exist as the NFTA and their demolition contracted came to me fror prints of teh drawings I made as an aid in demolition. They told me flat out that no drawings existed, only the ones I had made. Since demolition of the building was inevitable anyway I provided copies and got some kind of compensation that I have long since forgotten.

It sounds like you put in quite a bit of effort into this project! You might want to see if a copy shop could take your originals and use their large format copier to make a copy so as not to damage your originals...

A floorplan of the first two floors of the station and a track chart including the lead going to the docks was published in the Railway Age Gazette early last century. I believe the year was 1917. I have an extensive collection of information on the station, as well as a great artifact (the porcelian sign with glass letters that said "Danger Staion Exit") but all are in storage and difficult to access at the moment so I apologize for not posting it here. Point is, such drawings do exist.

Now that you mention it, I did get the 2 floor plans from the old railway age during my research of the building but that was all that was available, just 2 floors of the main building. I have a xerox of those somewhere in my files and used them as a basis to build my drawings combined with all my photos and measurements. Other than that nothing original exists at least to my knowledge on research I did over 30 yerars ago. No complete set of drawings or any of the real originals from Kenneth Murchison the architetural firm was found to exist back then.

The drawings in RY age were reduced small for the article and contained a lot of detail so they were hard to read, I tried to enlarge them to glean detail from them needed for the set I produced but things got very fuzzy when enlarged.

When they tore the building down we salvaged some scroll iron work and Terra Cotta cast ornate work. Some was donated to an architectural museum (Jack Randall) who was in the Prudential building at the time along with photos and story cards. A friend in Hamburg had a number of pieces used as decoration in his gardens at home.

Glad to hear that sign was salvaged, sounds like you have restored it. When we tried to get it just before demolition it was severly rusty, can't remember if the reflective jewels were still in the sign. We found a cable and hooked it to the sign, other end to the bumper of my car. I was smoking the tires on South park and the sign would,t pull free, the cable finally snapped and we gave up on the sign. Glad to see it go a good home.

colorado wrote:Glad to hear that sign was salvaged, sounds like you have restored it. When we tried to get it just before demolition it was severly rusty, can't remember if the reflective jewels were still in the sign. We found a cable and hooked it to the sign, other end to the bumper of my car. I was smoking the tires on South park and the sign would,t pull free, the cable finally snapped and we gave up on the sign. Glad to see it go a good home.

Now that's a good story!

-otto-