If there’s a poster child for the Brown Administration’s ineptness when it comes to preservation issues, it is the Blacksmith Shop complex in the Cobblestone District. A Buffalo Rising reader passed along pictures of a portion of the building that collapsed this week. Housing Court Judge Patrick Carney has been ineffective as well. The Darryl Carr-owned buildings at 110 and 118 South Park Avenue have been in and out of housing court for over a decade.
Despite the City’s “get tough” policy on negligent owners of historic properties, the City has been unable to prevent the buildings’ continued deterioration. The properties are the most iconic and most historically significant structures in the Cobblestone Historic District which was established in 1993 by the Buffalo Preservation Board and certified by the Secretary of the Interior as meeting the federal standards for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places.
110 South Park originally housed Muggeridge’s Steam Bakery which made hardtack for the Union army during the civil war. As late as the mid-nineties, 118 South Park was home to Rudnicki’s blacksmith shop.