File:Statler Towers (Statler Hotel), Delaware Avenue and Niagara Square, Buffalo, NY - 52685914739.jpg

English: Built in 1923, this Renaissance Revival-style twenty-story skyscraper was designed by George B. Post and Sons to house the Buffalo Statler Hotel, part of the Statler Hotel chain that was headquartered in Buffalo. The second permanent hotel that the Statler family built in Buffalo, the building replaced an earlier hotel that stood on the site, housed in the former Millard Fillmore mansion, known as the Castle Inn, and an earlier flagship Statler Hotel, which was built in 1907, and located at the southeast corner of Swan Street and Washington Street in a building that was heavily influenced by the nearby Guaranty Building. Ellsworth Milton Statler, whom owned the business, had started in the hospitality industry with a restaurant in the basement of the Ellicott Square building in 1896, expanding with a 2,000-room temporary hotel at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and a 2,200 room hotel at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, which were so successful that Statler, a former bellhop, decided to re-enter the Hotel business permanently. The present building was the flagship hotel for the chain, which was based in Buffalo, but had hotels all around the United States, which featured amenities that are commonly expected today, including private bathrooms, telephones in each room, and free stationery and newspapers, and were priced at a moderate cost for more average travelers, rather than being targeted at wealthy clientele. Statler also wanted to attract the city’s elite to his establishment, and thus bought the nearby Iroquois Hotel, a longstanding center of social life for Buffalo’s elite and business class, in 1923, and closed it a day after his new hotel opened. Arguably, the original Hotel Statler was more architecturally significant, as it was one of the largest ever Art Nouveau buildings constructed in the United States, and featured a far more unique and distinctive interior and exterior, as well as being the first hotel to have all the innovative features that Statler became known for. Like the similarly significant Larkin Building, however, the original Statler Hotel Buffalo was demolished in 1968 to make way for a “shovel-ready” development site, with no regard for the non-monetary value of the building. Private development never materialized on the site, and it sat as a barren parking lot until a baseball stadium and plaza were built on the site in the late 20th Century.

The building features a tripartite composition, with a four-story base, which extends to the rear (east) of the tower along Genesee Street and Mohawk Street to Franklin Street, which contains many of the hotel’s major public spaces, including meeting rooms, ballrooms, lobbies, and retail spaces. Above the base rises a tower, twenty stories tall and E-shaped, with two light wells on the western side of the building that extend deep into the block to the east, with a largely unadorned red brick-clad section between the sill line of the windows on the sixth floor to the sill line of the windows on the eighteenth floor, forming the “shaft” of the composition. At the top is a more richly detailed three-story section of the building, forming the “capital” of the composition, drawing the eye upwards and emphasizing the verticality of the building. The first floor is clad in stone with rustication, with the second and third floors sharing large window bays with decorative surrounds, which include decorative keystones, broken pediments with cartouches, triple arched window openings flanked by doric pilasters and recessed niches on the western facade, paired arched windows facing Niagara Square, separated by doric pilasters, and smaller windows at the east end of the building along Franklin Street and Mohawk Street. Above the arched window bays are low-slope roofs enclosed by decorative balustrades, with smaller window openings on the fourth floor featuring decorative stone trim, with the window bays around the perimeter of the base of the tower portion of the building being flanked by doric pilasters, with an architrave with triglyphs and decorative reliefs above the pilasters, and a cornice featuring modillions running around the sill line of the fifth floor windows, marking the base of the transition from the base to the shaft. The fifth floor features windows with decorative surrounds and keystones with busts, and is topped with a cornice, which is the last strong horizontal datum before the building becomes an unadorned brick shaft for the next twelve floors. The building features double-hung and fixed windows, some of which are original, and others of which are replacements, with two-over-two windows being predominant between the sixth and eighteenth floors. On the eighteenth floor, the sill line of the windows is a line of stone belt coursing, with decorative window trim at the window openings, and a cornice with dentils above the windows, originally extending further out from the facade, but having been chiseled away due to structural issues in the late 20th Century. The nineteenth and twentieth floors feature decorative trim once again, with the outermost bays of the individual north and south facades, as well as the west facade, featuring single windows flanked by doric pilasters with decorative window trim, including busts on the keystones, and the middle bays being recessed, flanked by ionic pilasters, with copper spandrel panels. The top of the twentieth floor windows is a line of belt coursing, above which are a few courses of brick, with decorative reliefs above the doric pilasters on the east and west facades, which sits below the building’s cornice, which features brackets, and runs around the base of the brick parapet that encloses the building’s low-slope roof. Atop the parapet above the doric pilasters are decorative urns. The rear of the building also features a large circulation tower, housing the building’s main stairways and elevators, which features a largely unadorned facade with four oxeye openings with stone trim at the top, with this being the least detailed section of the building’s exterior.

Inside, the building features many original semi-public spaces that have been partially preserved from the original period of construction and function as a hotel. These include the “palm room”, the main lobby that is themed after a tropical garden, which sits just outside the hotel’s main dining room, a two-story space with a vaulted ceiling, decorative archways, paired arched second-story openings with balustrades and columns, arched windows above the dining room entrance, an entrance portico at the dining room with ionic columns, a decorative cornice, a broken pediment with a cartouche, and a decorative balustrade atop the portico, and a fountain surrounded by greco-roman statues. There is also the Terrace Room, which features a decorative beam ceiling, ionic columns, and a section of the ceiling that is vaulted, the golden ballroom, formerly the hotel’s main dining room, which features a cantilevered second-story balcony with ionic columns featuring capitals and accents clad in gold leaf, decorative trim and panels clad in gold leaf, a wooden parquet floor, and a vaulted ceiling, and a room in the mezzanine with well-preserved carved wood paneling and black marble fireplace surrounds. Other spaces, including the lounge, tea room, cafeteria, swimming pool, and turkish baths, have not been preserved in as intact of a condition.

The hotel began to see a decline in occupancy with the onset of the Great Depression, with several of its 1,100 rooms regularly sitting vacant. As a result, it began to see portions of its interior converted into office space, which accelerated after the opening of the WBEN TV studio in the building. The Statler hotel chain was bought out by Hilton in 1954, which continued to use the Statler brand on hotels that the chain had already built, but eventually phased it out. The hotel finally shuttered in 1984, with the building being renamed the Statler Towers. The building became largely vacant, with only the lower floors being occupied, with the highest occupancy being in the street-facing retail spaces. In the 2000s, the building was slated for conversion into a hotel and condominium, but this proved unsuccessful when the entity that owned the building went bankrupt, leading to a foreclosure and the building being threatened with demolition. Preservationists worked hard to save the building, leading to it being auctioned to a developer in 2010, whom started to stabilize the structure and address its deferred maintenance, reopening the event spaces on the lower floors in 2011, with plans to eventually renovate the rest of the building with an incremental, multi-phased approach. After that developer died, the building was sold to another developer, whom has announced plans to convert the base into a combination of parking, meeting and event space, amenity space, and retail space, with 600 apartments on the upper levels, with work being well underway in 2022.