Buffalo Rising Online

So true. Great post.

An underrated, seldom-acknowledged element that makes Elmwood Avenue a great street is the residential buffering that is proided between the various commercial nodes along the street. This reinforces the human scale of Elmwood Avenue, and makes it a great street for a long stroll; it's not an endless corridor of boutique after boutique, but rather a string of interesting subdistricts, each with their own character. Thanks for putting a spotlight on the residential aspect of Elmwood.

I do wish there was fewer breaks in the retail portions of Elmwood. In some ways these residential stretches hamper the street. But that being said the houses that are there are quite spectacular.

Nice article, Steel. I agree with Dan's astute comment. Elmwood never seems "boutiquey," and I think that gives it more class and character than a saturated retail street. If you walk its entire length, say from the Albright-Knox to City Hall, you'll expereince one of the most interesting urban streets in the country--for architectural mix, socio-economic diversity, and variety of moods. It's our most well-known and successful street yet at the same time one of our most underrated and underobserved.

Those days are long gone for Elmwood....(the atwater house proved that no one cares about elmwood residential unless its an apartment building or mixed use apartment/retail) and the few houses that remain on elmwood are embarrassments to their former with no sign a gutter cleaning less of restoration

However, the real forgotten manson streets are the cross streets that run East-West such as Ferry

and of course....the long lost mansions of the cobblestone and the eastside of which only a rare few remain.....

Please have more posts on the history of Elmwood Avenue. Elmwood is strange in that you always here things about the history of almost every other part of the city, but from a historical information POV, it almost seems like Elmwood appeared in the last 20 years from our of no where.

Elmwood didnt appear out of the last 20 years....

The Elmwood we know actually started to appear in the late 60s and early 70s during the peak of the sububan exodus to places like Kenmore, the Tonawandas, Grand Island, Amherst and Cheektowaga from the West Side and Eastside.

At that time the only thing keeping Delaware, Elmwood and Richmond alive was Buffalo State students and the el cheapo hippie shops that catered to them.

Now Delaware and Linwood and Richmond are back. Elmwood is the center and its struggling to go upscale but with no help from the property owners large swaths of Elmwood still remain unpainted unmaintained eyesores. Buffalo State still has a minority president that has more commitment to her hair than she does to managing and growing the college and integrating it to the surrounding community. The college stores and apartments on Elmwood should have moved to Grant long ago. If only Buffalo State expanded the college instead of refusing 10,000 applicants a year, letting private developers build off campus dormatories because she cant manage the responsibility to build them, much less labs, small business incubatos and expanded program curiculae. Yes Buffalo State to a great degree saved Elmwood and the surrounding neighborhood.....but Howard has no comprehension of Buffalo State or her job as president.