File:Michael J. Dillon Federal Building, Court Street and Niagara Square, Buffalo, NY - 52685641236.jpg

English: Built in 1935-1936, this Art Deco and Stripped Classical Revival-style building was designed by Edward B. Green and Sons and Lawrence Bley and Duane Lyman to house the United States District Courthouse, utilizing funds from the Public Works Administration (PWA), part of the New Deal. The building was dedicated by then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 upon its completion, and is one of many federal buildings around the United States that were funded by the New Deal in the 1930s. It was renamed in 1986 in memory of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Officer Michael J. Dillion, who was killed while trying to collect back taxes from a US Citizen in 1983. The building is located on an oddly-shaped block bounded by Niagara Square, Court Street, Niagara Street, and Franklin Street, leading to the pentagon-shaped footprint of the building, and was originally intended to have twelve floors, which had to be downsized to seven floors due to funding limitations. The building is clad in sandstone with a granite base, with bands of low-relief ornamentation around the base of the first floor windows, below the sills of the second floor windows and third floor windows, and around the base of the upper parapet, with the most notable and ornate relief being in a band around the top of the parapet where the building sets back at the fifth floor. The building has aluminum windows, with the windows on the third, fourth, and fifth floors aligned in recessed vertical columns with decorative aluminum spandrel panels, and separated by fluted pilasters, with two windows in the bays over the main entrances on Court Street and Niagara Street, with a central aluminum pilaster between the windows, and the windows on the sixth and seventh floors aligned into vertical columns with aluminum spandrel panels on every facade except the Court Street facade, where the windows extend vertically across both floors. The main entrances feature decorative stone surrounds topped with sculptures including eagles with shields and volutes, with the words “United States Courthouse” carved into the stone above the doors, decorative aluminum screens on the transoms above the doors, with two Art Deco-style aluminum lampposts flanking the doorway at the Court Street entrance and two similar Art Deco-style wall sconces flanking the doorway at the Niagara Street entrance. The interior of the building features well-preserved lobbies with terrazzo and stone floors, decorative chandeliers, aluminum radiator grilles, trim, doors, and railings, ceilings with decorative borders, stone-clad fluted columns, and dark green marble wainscoting in the elevator lobbies of the building. The building originally served as a federal office building, Downtown Buffalo branch of the US Post Office, and a federal courthouse, with the post office moving out in the late 20th Century to make way for additional space for federal offices, and eventually federal offices outgrowing the building entirely and ending up scattered about Downtown Buffalo. In 2011, the new Robert H. Jackson Federal Courthouse was completed, prompting the federal courts and offices to move out of the building. After the federal courts and offices moved out, the building was purchased by the City of Buffalo in 2016, and adapted to house the headquarters of the Buffalo Fire Department and the Buffalo Police Department.