File:City Centre I & II, downtown Buffalo, New York - 20211204.jpg

English: A view looking northwest from the corner of Main and East Chippewa Streets in downtown Buffalo, New York most prominently includes the City Centre Condominiums, at right. This 180-foot-tall, 14-story, postmodern-style mixed-use development was at the vanguard of the flurry of mostly upscale residential and mixed-use development downtown that has been long championed by local urbanists but did not really take off until after the turn of the millennium. As would become the rule for these new developments, City Centre is an example of adaptive re-use of an existing building - namely the seven-floor Nemmer Building, a former furniture warehouse and theater that had been built in 1927 and vacant since the early 1980s, which beginning in 1991 and with financial backing from the Buffalo Enterprise Development Corporation was stripped down to its girders, had five additional stories added to its top, was "re-skinned", and finally opened to residents in 1993. Perhaps due to the fact that it represented the first large-scale attempt at attracting residential development downtown, with potential buyers perhaps not yet sold on the viability of such a concept, City Centre was at first plagued by stubborn financial difficulties: the condos were still only half-full (and the four floors of office space at the bottom were still nearly empty) by 1996, the year the company now known as the Larkin Development Group was finally able to secure a $3.8 million loan from M&T Bank, which was used to end its tenure of a year and a half under Chapter 11 bankruptcy and to finally finish the uncompleted upper floors and the parking ramp. Although Larkin came to the project with a sterling track record vis-à-vis the other redeveloped properties it manages, and despite revenue from the U.S. Secret Service, who at one point leased the entire third floor for their local offices, M&T in 2006 foreclosed on the aforementioned four floors of office space after the Larkin Group defaulted on their payments to the 1996 loan. To the left is the three-story commercial building known as City Centre II. Built in 2003, this was originally planned as an identical twin for the high-rise condo tower to its right, but was scaled back due to Larkin's financial woes.