File:Calumet Building, Chippewa Street and Franklin Street, Buffalo, NY.jpg

English: Built in 1906, this Chicago School-style building with Art Nouveau-style motifs was designed by Esenwein & Johnson for Robert Keating Root to serve as a commercial office building, with retail spaces on the first floor. The distinctive building also has a darker side to its history, as it was the home of the offices of the local Buffalo chapter of the Ku Klux Klan between 1921 and 1924, at the height of the organization’s size, prominence, and membership, demonstrating that even northern cities like Buffalo, not just places in the Southern United States, have had historical ties and struggles with the presence of white supremacy. The Klan in Buffalo was disbanded in 1924 after the office was raided by the local Police Department, whom had planted an undercover officer within the organization, whom discovered many illegal activities. The membership list of the organization was confiscated in the raid and prominently displayed inside the Buffalo Police Headquarters, with many citizens visiting the police station to read the list, leading many within the organization to distance themselves from it, causing it to decline massively in membership and prominence within the city. The building over its long history also housed a variety of businesses, but became vacant and derelict during the city’s decline, before being purchased and renovated by Mark Goldman between 1988 and 1990, whom was instrumental in transforming the mostly vacant buildings along Chippewa Street into a series of bars, nightclubs, and restaurants, which remain clustered in the area today. The building features a terra cotta facade with Art Nouveau floral motifs, large pilasters between the window bays, some of which terminate in a decorative cap above the entrances to the first floor retail storefronts, Chicago-style second and third floor windows, a central entrance door to the upper floors with the word “Calumet” emblazoned on a terra cotta panel above, a low-slope roof enclosed by a parapet, first floor retail shopfronts with replacement storefronts, and red brick cladding on the side and rear facades. The building houses several retail spaces on the ground floor, with office space above, accessed via a rear addition of a stair and elevator tower with a curtain wall facade that creates a visual demarcation between it and the original building. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.