File:Old Greyhound Bus Station (Alleyway Theatre), Main Street, Buffalo, NY - 52686148193.jpg

English: Built in 1940-1941, this Art Moderne-style building was designed by Roswell E. Pfohl and Louisville-based Greyhound architect William S. Arrasmith to serve as the Greyhound Bus Station for Buffalo. The building originally served as a bus station for eight other bus companies other than greyhound, and featured 11 docks for buses on the south side of the building in what is now called Curtain Up Alley. The building also housed a restaurant and offices, as well as baggage handling areas, a large waiting room, and a ticket office. The building was home to intercity bus service until 1979, when Greyhound moved to the newly-completed Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority Bus Terminal on Ellicott Street several blocks to the south. Shortly after it was vacated, the building was used as a film set for the MGM movie Hide In Plain Sight, and was then purchased by the city of Buffalo, intending for its conversion into a police substation and community center, with the building being used as a police station and community center until 2001. In the summer of 1983, the Buffalo Theater Collective began to lease part of the building from the city, working to convert part of the bus terminal into a 250-seat venue they dubbed the Alleyway Theatre, which opened in December of 1985. In 2001, the building was renovated to its present configuration, and the new, larger Alleyway Theatre opened in 2005.

The building is clad in limestone and terra cotta, with long ribbon windows at the south end of the front facade, porthole windows on the south facade, rounded corners, an aluminum canopy over the front entrance, blue terra cotta panels separated by aluminum trim at the base, curved walls flanking the aluminum entry doors, a second-story window over the entrance with a curved southern end, continual horizontal lines across the windows and blue terra cotta pilasters made of aluminum trim, a band of blue terra cotta at the top of the parapet, which enclosed a low-slope roof, brick cladding at the north end of the second floor of the front facade, and a simpler, black and white masonry rear facade with aluminum windows and a long canopy that stretches from the angled west wall of the front wing to the end of the building at Pearl Street, a space known as Curtain Up Alley. The interior still features the original lobby with art moderne trim, cylindrical columns, aluminum railings, terrazzo floor, and staircase to the upper floor. There are additional spaces within the buildings that still feature the original tile, including a conference room located in a former restroom.

The building has been fully adaptively reused to serve as a theater, and is one of only a few buildings designed by William S. Arrasmith still standing. It was also the last major building project along Buffalo’s Main Street north of Lafayette Square prior to the 1960s. The building’s original dock area for buses to the rear has been heavily altered, as the expansion of the stage and construction of a new backstage area for the adjacent Shea’s Buffalo Theater in 1997-1999 encroached northward into the western end of this space, leaving only the canopy shelter as a pedestrian link between Main Street and Pearl Street through Curtain Up Alley. Today, the Alleyway Theatre is one of several live performance and performing arts venues that are clustered along Main Street in an area of Downtown Buffalo that has been dubbed the “Theater District.”