File:Craven-Bassett House, Buffalo, New York - 20200624 - 02.jpg

English: The Craven-Bassett House, 278 Depew Avenue at Parker Avenue, Buffalo, New York, June 2020. Among the first homes to be built in the Central Park subdivision on land previously belonging to quarry owner Lewis Bennett, the house was erected in 1894 following a design by architect John H. Coxhead, who abandoned his usual Romanesque proclivities for the project in favor of a Colonial Revival aesthetic that incorporates eclectic influences: the ample, roughly symmetrical front portico with Ionic columns is more or less classic to the style, but the engaged Medina sandstone columns with stylized Corinthian capitals framing the front entrance does indeed add a Romanesque touch, while the tent-roofed balcony crowning the two-story bay window on the Parker Avenue side of the house (not seen here) is suggestive of Queen Anne architecture and the dormer piercing the hipped roof on the main façade foreshadows the Prairie style. James B. Craven (1867-1928) was its first owner, a civil engineer who worked at the time as superintendent of the Field Engineering Company; his tenure in the house was relatively short (four years), as were those of subsequent owners Henry H. Waters (1847-1901); owner of the Empire Metallic Bedstead Company), Judson M. Sells (1873-1944; manager of the Northern Steamship Company whose passenger ships cruised the Great Lakes), and Alexander R. Petrie (1892-1966; vice-president and later president of the Ontario Biscuit Company, which later merged into the Keebler Company and Kellogg's). For the bulk of its history, however, 278 Depew served as home to Charles Kingman Bassett, who was vice-president of the Buffalo Meter Company; he purchased the place in 1927 and lived there until his death in 1984 at the age of 92 years.