File:Alfred Volckman House, Buffalo, New York - 20210915.jpg

English: The Alfred Volckman House, 700 West Delavan Avenue, Buffalo, New York, September 2021. Set back generously off West Delavan Avenue behind a verdant wall of shrubbery, this charming wood-framed Italianate cottage figures among the oldest extant buildings in the tony Elmwood Village section of the city. The eye is drawn immediately to the unusually sumptuous ornamentation: the raking dentil row that underlies the roof gable, the pleasantly landscaped front yard, and - above all - the Eastlake-style woodwork on the wraparound front porch, with elegantly carved spindle balustrades, a hanging frieze lining the top edge with an unusual ball-and-shaft decorative motif, and the pinwheel brackets adjoining the aforementioned to the square posts holding up the shallow-pitched shed roof. A native of Stratford-le-Bow, England, Alfred Volckman (1823-1894) was a former West Side grocer who, upon moving to this cottage that he had built for him in 1867 on what was then the semirural outskirts of town, took on a second career as a small-plot farmer. He and his wife, Mary née Barnett (1829-1915), both lived in the house until their respective deaths.