File:Society of St. Vincent de Paul - fmr Willys-Overland assembly plant, F. N. Burt Company warehouse, et al. - Buffalo, New York - 20200415.jpg

English: The Society of St. Vincent de Paul building, 1298 Main Street at Bryant Street, Buffalo, New York, April 2020. The charitable St. Vincent de Paul Society came to the Diocese of Buffalo in 1847, and their offices, warehouse, soup kitchen, and not-for-profit thrift store have been located here since about 1993, but the building has a long and multifaceted history as home to a variety of manufacturing concerns. A classic example of the "daylight factory" school of industrial architecture (albeit with some uncharacteristically ornate Neoclassical ornamentation here and there), the building appears to date to the 1910s, when it was built by the then-rapidly expanding Willys-Overland Motor Company as one of several new assembly plants. The building was sold in 1935 to the F.N. Burt Company, a manufacturer of paper boxes who used the building to house their Folding Carton Division; according to a 1952 write-up in the Buffalo Courier Express, the divison made up nearly 20% of the company's sales volume at the time and offered a high-grade lithographing service. Burt moved to Cheektowaga sometime in the 1960s or early 70s, and through 1993 the Trench Manufacturing Company used it as their new factory where they turned out a line of felt baseball pennants and, by this point in the company's history, also licensed sports apparel.