File:Dean Architects - fmr Railway Branch YMCA - Depew, New York - 20210219.jpg

English: Dean Architects, 3284 Walden Avenue at Tyler Street, Depew, New York, February 2021. Erected in 1896 as one of the first batch of institutional buildings built by the Depew Improvement Company for the then-newly founded village, this serves as an anachronistic example of the Second Empire architectural style with its bracketed cornice, pedimented dormer windows framed by stylized columns, and of course, proud mansard roof. However, the shingle-sided, tent-roofed corner turret and the asymmetrical front porch with its off-center pediment both borrow from the Queen Anne style, which was much less passé at the time. The building functioned initially as the so-called Railroad Branch YMCA, which appears to have been defunct by 1912: a Depew Herald article from that year mentions a proposal to move the "former Y.M.C.A. building" to nearby Transit Road and convert it to a hotel, which apparently never materialized as the building remains on its original site. By 1939 it was in use as apartments, initially with a modest but respectable lower-middle-class tenant base composed mainly of workers at the machine shops and factories gathered around the New York Central Railroad line; the village's raison d'être. By the 1980s it had degenerated into a sleazy and dilapidated rooming house, and it was slated for demolition by 1998, when DeanSutton Architecture purchased the building and fully restored it for use as their offices. Dean Architects, the successor firm, remains headquartered there today.