File:Dudley Branch Library, Buffalo, New York - 20230209.jpg

English: The Dudley Branch of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library System at 2010 South Park Avenue, as seen on a rainy February 2023 afternoon. Completed in 1963 to a design by local architect Joseph E. Fronczak, this sprawling, single-story brick building is an interesting example of the then-popular Modernist style fused with some highly stylized influences from the Art Moderne, which had enjoyed a brief flareup of popularity several decades before but was by then passé. Notice the horizontal orientation, the projecting pilaster strips interspersed between the front windows, the stepped setbacks in the leftward section of the façade, and the chrome-finished overhang at right. Named in honor of Joseph P. Dudley (1832-1907), a prominent local industrialist, civic leader, and philanthropist who was serving as president of the Buffalo Public Library's board of directors at the time of its opening, the Dudley Branch traces its history back to 1903, when the board finally responded to the complaints of the citizenry of South Buffalo, far removed geographically from the Central Library downtown yet long lacking a facility of their own, by establishing the system's third and newest branch library in a rented space three blocks north of here at the corner of Richfield Avenue, which in turn was superseded in 1922 by a "one-story red brick building of Gothic architecture" that occupied the right half of the present-day site. Talk of replacing that structure with a still larger and more modern one dates all the way back to 1938, when it was included in a long list of proposed projects to be financed by a federal Public Works Administration grant (this after having narrowly averted closure just for the next few decades as the neighborhood expanded and the library building grew ever more cramped and dilapidated. Indeed, it was not until 1960 when the city government completed the purchase of the 6,700-square-foot, L-shaped parcel north and east of the original site to accommodate the footprint of a larger building. Architect Fronczak was hired in April of he following year to draw up a design for the new library, whose yearlong, $110,000 construction process kicked off with a June 1962 groundbreaking.