Buffalo Rising Online

Oct 24th 2008, 8:14am By STEEL

Regular BRO readers may be familiar with the Queen City Farm project at 187 East Utica on the Near East Side. That project is taking a vacant Victorian city house and converting it into a farm house. They plan to plow up surrounding empty land and set it to use for growing crops. Their mission:

"Queen City Farm will transform approximately 2.25 acres of currently vacant lots into fresh nutritious food with sustainable farming techniques. A small portion of the farm will be cultivated for market to contribute to the local economy and financially sustain the farm; most of the acreage will be cultivated for distribution to low-income residents of the neighborhood and community."

There are other city farm houses around too but, unlike the Queen City house which is becoming a farm, these no longer function as farm houses. Instead they have become city houses.

If you are at all familiar with the city you may have noticed a house here and there that does not quite fit in with the typical long narrow densely built city type. They sit way back from the sidewalk and are low slung and wide. These oddballs are left over farmhouses. Of course at one time most of Buffalo was either woods or farm land and just as it goes today the sprawl of the 19th and early 20th century eventually consumed that farm land.

I know of at least four of these farm houses. One is on Main Street in the Parkside / Central Park area, and is now a funeral home. One is a very old stone place on the East Side that the city has promised to restore. Another, still used as a house, is on Lafayette just east of Elmwood. There once was a very interesting old place on a small hill at the far south end of the city. We always thought it was haunted. It was surrounded by a large scrubby wooded lot and had a kind of Hitchcock "Psycho" house type look to it. It was sadly replaced by a fairly mundane senior housing building about 10 years ago. If you want to find the site, look for the giant blue water tower.

The former farmhouse pictured here is a favorite of mine. It sits on Delevan Avenue, again just east of Elmwood, right next to School 56 (which I think is now called Olmsted School). When I attended School 56 this was the house of the shop teacher. For as long as I have known it this beauty has been in immaculate condition with this beautiful deep red color (seemingly never in need of a paint job). It is a great counterpoint to the massive red brick and very urban city school next door.

Come to think of it there is another old South Buffalo farm house on Abbott Road next to a big school. It is quite a substantial house and must have belonged to a pretty good farmer. If you know of any others in town, chime in and let me know where they are.