File:Young Mens Christian Association Central Building (Olympic Towers), Franklin Street and Genesee Street, Buffalo, NY - 52685631251.jpg

English: Built in 1901-1902, this Flemish Revival-style 11-story building was designed by Edward B. Green and William S. Wicks to house the central branch of the Buffalo Young Mens Christian Association (YMCA). The building housed offices, recreational facilities, and hotel rooms originally, until the YMCA chapter, the third-oldest in the United States, closed in the 1980s. The building features a red brick exterior with sandstone trim, a mansard roof on the tower with gables featuring gable parapets and arched windows, parapets with stone caps, wall dormers with arched pediments, replacement windows, a multi-story oriel window on the south facade, clad in limestone, with a decorative parapet, stone quoins and belt coursing, flemish gables, a two-story bay window on the Pearl Street facade, and a doric entrance portico with doric pilasters, columns, and a cornice on the former Genesee Street facade, which is now mostly blocked from view by the construction of the Buffalo-Niagara Convention Center in 1978, which takes up most of the former street right-of-way, leaving only a narrow alleyway passage between the convention center and the former YMCA building. After the YMCA closed, the building was converted into an office building known as Olympic Towers, and received a four-story addition to the north, which includes a glass-enclosed atrium with a long skylight that links the historic building to the newer section, and glass curtain walls on the exterior. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, and today still houses various commercial office tenants.