File:Canisius High School Koessler Academic Center - fmr Buffalo Consistory, Accepted Scottish Rite F.&A.M.; George F. Rand, Jr. House - Buffalo, New York - 20210414.jpg

English: Seen in April 2021, the Koessler Academic Center of Canisius High School (not to be confused with the similarly-named Koessler Athletic Center of Canisius College) is located in the former George F. Rand, Jr. House at 1180 Delaware Avenue (corner Cleveland Avenue) in Buffalo, New York. Though a degree of Colonial influence shines through around the front entrance, with engaged Tuscan columns and a swan's-neck pediment framing a keystone-studded arch, the architectural style of the house overall is categorized firmly within Tudor Revivalism, with a side-gabled roof accentuated by a pair of finial-topped front gables with trios of chimney pots rising behind, and elegant two-story bay windows with trefoil patterns carved into the parapets at top (unfortunately blocked out by the tree branches here). The house was erected in 1921 and is the work of architects Franklyn J. and William A. Kidd. The house's intended owner was George Franklin Rand, Sr. (1867-1919), the patriarch of what could be described as the first family of Buffalo's Gilded Age financial community; he was best known as president and chairman of the board of the Marine Trust Company. However, he died in a plane crash in England two years before the house's completion, and being a widower, the house passed into the hands of his son, George Jr. (1891-1942), himself a bigwig executive with Marine Trust as well as simultaneous president of the Buffalo Trust Company (the two entities merged in 1926, with Rand as president). The house was the site of Rand's wedding to the former Isabel Hadley, but he moved out after less two years - because its connection with the death of his father led to "too many unpleasant memories", according to Edward T. Dunn's book Buffalo's Delaware Avenue: Mansions and Families - and sold the house in November 1922 to the Accepted Scottish Rite of Free and Associated Masons, who used the building as their local consistory before selling it onward to Canisius High School in 1944. Although the school was, in the dozen or so years following their purchase of the Rand House, responsible for the demolition of several adjacent historic structures including the 1861 John Milburn House, by all accounts the expansions made to the former Rand House have been mostly tasteful vis-à-vis its architectural integrity.