This beautiful roof peak sculpture is on a house at 100 Oxford in the Oxford Square neighborhood, named after the street that runs north/south down its center. This neighborhood is a generally triangular shaped area of several blocks between Linwood and Main and Ferry and Delavan. It was recently featured in a slideshow by Elena. (Damn her! She beat me to the punch.)
This is a very beautiful section of the city and should be every bit as popular as nearby Elmwood Village, but once fell prey to poverty, real and perceived crime, and racist attitudes. If you want an Elmwood Village style house at a fraction of the cost, this is the place for you. It is very much worth focusing more attention on this very valuable few blocks, so I will do another slide show in a few months.
In Elena's
slide show this magnificent work of art slid by very quickly, but I though it
worth a closer look. The city is filled with many extraordinary pediment
decorations, but this might just be the best of them all. It is very
large and extremely dense with detail. Usually these are actually cast
from plaster rather than carved from wood. That makes them extremely
delicate and susceptible to neglect and Buffalo's harsh winters. I will have a
sadder pediment story in the near future. This one is slightly worn but is almost completely intact in spite
of its extremely delicate composition and less than perfect maintenance.
[Editor's note: Ouch.]
I thought it was called the "Ivy Triangle"? Anyway looked at a few wonderfully original houses here, the blight scared me off... Maybe when Gates Cirle Hospital is gone, there can be an attempt to reconnect this neighborhood to the West Side.