No. 34 Plymouth Avenue, located between Hudson and Pennsylvania streets, has been put up for sale. Most home sale listings are not milestones, but this one is. It represents the evolution of the street, and its residents, in a microcosm.
Plymouth Avenue, one of the western boundaries of the Allentown Historic Preservation District, is one of the earliest populated streets in the district. By the mid-1830s, the area began to be settled. By those standards, 34 Plymouth Avenue is a new kid on the block. It is listed for sale at $299,900 by MJ Peterson Real Estate’s Robert Karp and has three bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and 2,300 sq.ft. of living space.
Some history on the house and neighborhood from area resident Chris Brown:
In 1889, two substantial homes, nearly 3,000 square feet each, displaced an earlier commercial paint shop and barn at 34-38 Plymouth Avenue. No. 38 Plymouth was lost to a fire and a new house was built on the site in the 1980s. No. 34 Plymouth narrowly escaped a similar fate. The especially well-designed 2½ story Queen Anne/Shingle style home style features a gable roof with an extended front slope that incorporates the front porch with square support columns and a pediment over the entrance stairs. The home has a large three-story turret with a polygonal tent roof and flat-headed windows. The home also has a pedimented dormer on its second floor and a smaller pedimented dormer located above with a pair of windows.
Built in 1889 as a speculation house, it was sold to its first owner-occupant family, Mr. Robert Morris, his wife Sarah Ogden Morris, and their three daughters: Lucy Van Name, Bessie Eunice, and Helen Sherman. The Morrises relocated to Buffalo from Binghamton. The Morrises typically had one servant living in the home to assist with household chores. Sarah Ogden Morris was a descendant of John Ogden, a pilgrim and early patriot, and was a distant cousin of Caroline Carmichael Fillmore (the second wife of Millard Fillmore) and Thomas Alva Edison. During the time the Morrises lived at 34 Plymouth Avenue, their next door neighbors at 30 Plymouth Avenue were Franklin and Charlotte Spaulding Sidway, members of one of Buffalo’s wealthiest and most influential families. While the family lived at 34 Plymouth, Lucy attended and graduated from Wellesley College in 1900 and had a career in newspaper journalism.
Like many houses in Allentown, a large home like 34 Plymouth began to be carved into apartments. In 1929, the house was converted to a rooming house and in 1943, a fire escape was added so that the rooms that were the former servant’s quarters could also be rented. The house became to symbolize the creeping blight that was sweeping through the Allentown neighborhood. The Allentown neighborhood was so impacted by blight during the 1950s and early 1960s, concerned citizens banded together to form The Allentown Association, which was incorporated in 1963 and is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary.
34 Plymouth (left), 1950. 38 Plymouth (right), since demolished.
While Allentown was considered home to Buffalo’s artist community, it was not a place that many Western New Yorkers wanted to call home. In 1970, a Buffalo News article described Allentown as a “wide-open market for drugs and as the seat of a communal culture which feeds on pot, some LSD and free love.” A police captain labeled Allentown as “an area where being busted becomes a badge of merit among members of the fraternity… Whether these people know it or not, they’re playing out the script written by the Communists for the overthrow of the democracies.”
The tide turned during the late 1970s with the creation of the Allentown Historic District, which gave a pedigree to many of the neighborhood’s structures. The 1980s were boom years for Allentown, where many homes sold quickly for high prices after being renovated. Carole Z. Holcberg, Allentown’s most prominent real estate agent during the 1980s, said: “property prices in Allentown were the strongest-appreciating in Western New York… [during] the entire decade of the ’80s.”
However, as a place of residential investment, Allentown faltered during the 1990s. Many people who invested in their homes in the 1980s lost thousands of dollars in the 1990s as home prices plummeted. A variety of root causes were thought to be the culprit: perception of high-crime, saturation of social service agencies, a contraction of businesses in Western New York. The problem was featured in a 1996 Buffalo News article which declared: “Halfway through the ’90s, the boom has gone bust.” The article painted a less than flattering image of Allentown: “Despite the charming boutiques and bar-restaurants that dot Allen Street, it is dotted with broken glass on abandoned storefront stoops. An old woman ambles by, clutching a bulging green plastic garbage bag and shouting at the sky.”
In response, community residents and their associated organizations rallied to fight these threats to the Allentown neighborhood. In 1997, the Kleinhans Community Association, the block club of residents who live near Kleinhans Music Hall, decided to focus its resources on the worst two blocks within its boundaries: Plymouth Avenue between Hudson and Pennsylvania Streets and Pennsylvania Street between Plymouth and West Avenues. It called the initiative the “Plymouth Avenue/Pennsylvania Street Redevelopment Target Area Project.” Block club members inventoried properties, identified problems and met with residents of the two blocks to engage them as well as to listen and record their concerns.
On June 25, 1997, the block club convened a meeting with its members, community stakeholders, and government officials at the First Presbyterian Church. The kickoff meeting was the official beginning of a grassroots effort to reclaim the two blocks. Three months later, the Allentown Association hosted its inaugural Allentown Alive! exposition on September 28, 1997 in conjunction with area real estate agents. The event featured a districtwide open house with trolley service from Allen Street to the homes.
Over the next few years, the Kleinhans Community Association members began to purchase homes on the two blocks, plant trees, focused a crime watch and did what they could to improve the quality of life on the two blocks. Meanwhile, property values continued to plummet. House sales of vacant houses were under $5,000 and those that were occupied frequently sold for less than $20,000.
In 2001, the block club partnered with Heart of the City Neighborhoods, Inc. to bring their resources to help reclaim these two blocks. During the summer of 2001, 34 Plymouth Avenue suffered a terrible fire. The owner had no insurance or resources to repair the property and it sat empty for several years. There was immense pressure from some factions within City Hall to demolish the house, but the block club and resources from Heart of the City fought back and held off the demolition. Heart of the City had an increased presence on the block when in 2003, Dinah Gamin honored her deceased partner Candace Church’s wish to purchase 42 Plymouth Avenue to be used for Heart of the City Neighborhood’s home.
Joe Delaney, a retired State of New York architect, neighborhood resident, volunteer, and preservationist, led the charge to gain control over 34 Plymouth Avenue. While the block club worked with the City of Buffalo to keep the wrecking ball at bay, Joe diligently worked to get the owner into housing court and appeared numerous times until pressure could be put on the owner to transfer the property.
Joe finally became the proud owner of the fire-damaged property in early 2005. Several prominent architectural historians toured the property including John Conlin, editor and founder of Western New York Heritage magazine, and Claire Ross, of the New York State Historic Preservation Office. Emboldened by their encouragement to preserve the house, Joe enlisted the resources of two other preservationists and neighborhood residents, John Gulick and Dave Stiglitz. John is one of Buffalo’s finest preservation restoration carpenters and Dave is an architect. Ownership was transferred to the trio in 2007 and they began to restore the building, putting on a new roof and stripping the asphalt siding to reveal the home’s original clapboard and shingle siding. They also removed the ugly fire escape installed in the 1940s. Sadly, Joe was never able to see the house renovations completed when he died unexpectedly in 2011 at the age of 71.
Meanwhile, the block club’s efforts began to bear fruit. Many houses on the first block of Plymouth Avenue were renovated and sold. The drug dealers and criminals disappeared from the block and home values began to normalize.
A new generation of Allentown home buyers emerged after the housing crisis of 2008. With the emergence of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus a few blocks away, these new buyers saw the virtues of the neighborhood that attracted its first generation of residents during the mid-nineteenth century. The new homeowners saw potential, unbiased by prejudices. One of the members of this new generation is Robert Karp, a real estate developer and sales agent. Practicing what he preaches, he lives two blocks away on Fargo Avenue between Hudson and Pennsylvania Streets as he renovates and resells nearby gems that need tender loving care.
If there was ever a house that needed the tender loving care to complete its journey, it was 34 Plymouth Avenue. In 2012, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Allentown boundary expansion that corrected anomalies in its original 1980 application. Rob had just completed the acquisition of another abandoned house on the block at 49 Plymouth Avenue and had renovated it and resold it. Rob acquired the unfinished house from John Gulick in February 2013 and began his own creative journey to complete the house.
When Joe Delaney had originally acquired the house, his vision was a two or three unit building that he would rent for income. Rob had a different vision. He returned the house to a single family dwelling and installed high-end features such as a modern kitchen with granite countertops and air conditioning. He also installed a driveway. He recently completed his renovations and listed it for sale on October 9. The asking price: $299,900.
When sold, it will be the first time it has been occupied in over a dozen years and the first time that it was a single family house in over 80 years. Not only does it represent the fully realized potential of the block, but the efforts of many people who have worked for over 15 years to save the block and the house. Over 120 years have passed since the house was first built and it has come full circle. No word yet whether the servants are expected to return.
Get Connected: Robert Karp, MJ Peterson Real Estate, 716.553.9963