A Buffalo hotel and former asylum undergoes extensive restoration

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Cities ebb and flow, so the ‘best’ time to visit a particular one might require a time machine, or for the patient Architourist to wait. New York wasn’t great in the 1970s and 80s, but it’s amazing now, and would’ve been in the 1940s and 50s. Paris, many say, was at its best during the Belle Époque, when the Eiffel Tower and the Métro were being built; Toronto would’ve been a blast to witness after New City Hall opened in 1965 and into the 70s, when it awoke from colonial sleepiness and became a dynamic, confident, immigrant city.

Right now, in 2023, and for the past 15 years or so, Buffalo, N.Y., has been having a moment: a massive heritage moment.

And it’s such a leader with restoration and adaptive reuse, it’s now taking a look at smaller buildings, says Preservation Buffalo Niagara executive director Bernice Radle: “We saved all of our very beautiful [first-tier] buildings, like Shea’s [Theatre] downtown, City Hall wasn’t demolished, Guaranty Building, Darwin Martin House … and then the second round are the warehouses and cool brick buildings and things that aren’t going to knock your socks off visually … and now what we’re entering is phase three.”

That phase, she says, includes buildings that may “barely qualify” based on architecture, but qualify for other reasons. “For example, we’re working on a brothel from [the 1840s], it was owned by this woman, Eliza Quirk.”

And with apologies to Ms. Quirk and 72 Sycamore St., on my most recent trip to Buffalo, I wanted to spend as much time as possible at the Buffalo State Asylum (designed 1869-70, opened 1880).

I first toured the massive complex by the father of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) in 2019 (Toronto’s Old City Hall, by E.J. Lennox, is in the same style). At that time, it had been “Hotel Henry” for less than two years. A victim of the pandemic, it closed in February, 2021, but, earlier this year, reopened as “The Richardson” under a new operator, developer Douglas Jemal (the 13-building complex and 17-hectare site is owned by New York State).

The Medina sandstone complex is impressive on many levels. It was the 31-year-old’s first shake at the style that would make him famous; it was the largest built work of his career; the asylum adopted the Kirkbride Plan, which, as conceived by psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride, consisted of wide hallways for socializing, patient seating areas with fireplaces (woman’s wing only, as the men weren’t trusted with fire), a (then) pastoral setting, tons of natural light, good air circulation and very high ceilings; the building was expanded multiple times; famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the grounds; and the historic buildings were emptied in 1974 and left abandoned until a 2002 win by the Preservation Coalition of Erie County forced the State of New York to stabilize the buildings.

“So what basically happened was these three buildings [the Towers Building and the two flanking buildings] cost US$114-million to restore,” says Paris Roselli, president of the Richardson Olmsted Campus and the Lipsey Architecture Center. “There’s another 400,000 square feet [unrestored], so it’s a quarter billion; if the state had just left the gas on to heat the buildings, even a million dollars a year, they could’ve saved it [all], but they didn’t.”

Mr. Roselli has agreed to take me on a tour of both the restored bits that now make up an 88-room boutique hotel, and the somewhat scary unrestored bits. During our walk of the hotel, Mr. Roselli points to interventions made to the original architecture, such as doorways, elevators and openings, where original pieces were able to remain in situ, such as the mosaic tile floor in one of the curved ‘arms’ that link buildings, and the new bump-outs into the wide corridors that were necessary to add washrooms to hotel rooms.

“They tried to make it look like furniture, a wardrobe or something,” he says. “The Park Service was pretty adamant that you can’t do it, but the not-for-profit that I worked for was pretty adamant that you can’t have a hotel without bathrooms.” This, he says, took a year of debate.

As we walk, I can’t help but smile at the quirkiness of it all. The complete opposite of a big box hotel, not only are there oodles of heritage bits to ogle – transoms, grand staircases, old office areas, an original iron column in my room – there are funny little spaces, nooks and unexpected delights even when one gets lost.

“This is an inconvenient hotel,” Mr. Roselli says with a laugh, “but if you know what you’re getting into it’s perfectly fine. … It’s not for your average business traveller.” No, but with Buffalo State University at its doorstep, an eight-minute walk to both the AKG Art Museum (formerly Albright-Knox) and the Burchfield Penney Art Center and the Buffalo Zoo and Darwin M. Martin House less than 10 minutes by car, it’s a cultural tourist’s paradise.

And with so much of the complex still unrestored, it’s a unique moment in time to stay and tour. One can almost feel the pulsing, unreleased energy that will burst into being in the next few decades. Speaking of which, Mr. Roselli was generous enough to extend our guided tour into the many Richardson buildings that await new life as apartments. More than just peeling paint, there are entire sections of floor missing, collapsed ceilings, a few charred areas from a squatter’s fire, failing windows, and crumbling plasterwork.

Outside, there is much to be addressed as well: “We probably have a couple more winters ahead of us [before work begins], and, like, every time I turn around there are more bricks falling out,” Mr. Roselli says as he points to a troublesome section of wall. “That was solid last year … and that’s why it’s a little bit more urgent.”

But if anyone can do it, Buffalonians can. It’s their time.

Portions of Mr. LeBlanc’s trip were provided by Visit Buffalo Niagara. They did not review or approve of this article. Hard hat/photography tours are available of the unrestored parts of the Richardson-Olmsted Campus; visit richardson-olmsted.com for more information.