File:Former Buxton & Rouse (later Rouse & Menzies) drugstore, Buffalo, New York - 20210922.jpg

English: As seen in September 2021: the three-story brick building at 251 Virginia Street (corner 10th Street), on the Lower West Side of Buffalo, New York, serves as an example of Italianate architecture that was built quite late in that style's era of popularity (1875), but is ultimately quite representative of the aesthetic. Round-arched windows are the rule, here topped with distinctive fluted keystones, and the eaves of the roof are undergirded at the front gable by a row of ornate brackets. Interesting as well are the cast-iron Corinthian pilasters, the only original remnant of the original ground-floor storefront which is now bricked over. The building served out its early years as a drugstore that was run by a succession of owners who passed the business along to their partners after their own departures. First came the English-born William Buxton (c. 1838-1883), who ran the shop until his retirement in 1881 along with his partner, Dr. Morris D. Rouse (1836-1913), a Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania-born physician who got his start during the Civil War as a surgeon with the 30th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry and was one of the longest-practicing physicians in Buffalo at the time of his retirement in 1893. By that time, Dr. Rouse was already directing most of his professional efforts toward his secondary interests in the real estate and insurance industries; indeed, it was in 1886 when he left the Virginia Street store in the care of his own partner, John W. Menzies (1859-1920), the former shop clerk whom he'd taken on as his own partner more or less immediately after Buxton's retirement. Menzies stayed on at the location until 1889. The building now contains low-income apartments owned by Heart of the City Neighborhoods, a not-for-profit agency.