File:Beverly Gray Business Exchange - fmr North Jefferson Branch Library - Buffalo, New York - 20200408.jpg

English: The Beverly Gray Business Exchange, formerly the North Jefferson Brach Library, 334 East Utica Street, Buffalo, New York, April 2020. Built in 1929 from a design by city-employed architect Howard Beck, the building sports an Italian Renaissance style with heavy Neolassical influence courtesy of features such as limestone friezes at the top and bottom of the blonde brick façade, round-arched windows, and especially the entrance onto East Utica Street which boasts a handsome pediment crowning a pair of Tuscan pilasters and engaged Corinthian columns. The North Jefferson Library closed in 2006 with the completion of the larger, more modern Frank E. Merriwether Library around the corner on Jefferson Avenue. After an award-winning rehabilitation process effected under the auspices of the New York State Historic Preservation Office using local labor and materials and involving the replacement or restoration of some of the building's original features (e.g. the skylights, terrazzo floors, and cast-iron rails and lampposts around the entrance), the Beverly A. Gray Business Services Incubator opened here in 2009, serving as one of the branches of the Buffalo Economic Renaissance Corporation, a quasi-governmental organization through which federal economic development funding is distributed and by which upstart businesses can receive necessary services and other assistance.