File:Humboldt House Rehabilitation & Nursing Center - fmr Niagara Lutheran Home for the Invalid Aged - Buffalo, New York - 20230113.jpg

English: The Humboldt House Rehabilitation & Nursing Center, 64 Hager Street at Florida Street, Buffalo, New York, January 2023. One of his late-period works, the design of this four-story, T-shaped brick building sees local architect Louis Greenstein thoroughly embracing the Modernist style: note the flat roof, preponderance of right angles, mechanically repetitive fenestration scheme, and almost total lack of exterior ornamentation. Among the few bits of visual pizzazz (not to mention pre-Modern stylistic influence) is the very slightly projecting central pavilion that contains the entrance, with light-colored stone trim surrounding the front door and rising to the roofline as a pair of simple pilaster strips "supporting" a modest cornice. Decorative brickwork in the form of a Christian cross intermingles with the upper-story windows in this section. The predecessor organization for which the building was constructed was the Niagara Lutheran Home for the Invalid Aged, a project of the Lutheran Council of the Niagara Frontier: in the words of Finance Committee chairman Edward J. Echtenkamp, its "first major [one]… since it was organized eight years" prior as a collaborative consortium of over sixty Lutheran congregations in Western New York representing the American, United, Augustana, and Missouri Synods. It was founded in 1955 and, after searching unsuccessfully for an existing building that could be adapted to suit their needs, the Council accepted a donation by the existing Lutheran Church Home of a parcel of land adjacent to their building on which a new, expandable facility could be constructed. Ground was broken on that structure in May 1955, and it was finally opened to patients on July 9, 1956. The expected expansion did come eventually, but not in the form of additions to the original building: in the 1990s, the Hager Street location became the flagship of the larger Niagara Lutheran Health System, which also comprised the Niagara Lutheran Delaware Home (i.e. the former Georgian Court Nursing Home at 1040 Delaware Avenue, which they purchased in 1990), the massive GreenFields Continuing Care Community in suburban Lancaster, which opened in 1998 and where services are now consolidated, and eventually the original Lutheran Church Home itself, which affiliated itself with the network in 2006 and closed its East Delavan Avenue location seven years later. In 2015, the Hager Street facility too was shuttered (Niagara Lutheran, having moved their corporate offices from there to the Lancaster campus several months prior, described it as a cost-cutting measure in light of the "low Medicaid reimbursement situation"), but the building was later purchased by new owners who today offer an essentially identical slate of skilled nursing services at what they have rechristened the Humboldt House.