File:Former Medical Arts Building, Bryant & Stratton Business Institute, Tapestry Charter School - Buffalo, New York - 20221020.jpg

English: As seen in October 2022, the three-story structure first known as the Medical Arts Building stands at 40 North Street (corner North Pearl Street) in Buffalo, New York. Designed by locally-based architect Louis Greenstein for real estate developer Max Katz, this is a handsome Colonial Revival structure wherein the cornucopia of Classical detailing is focused on the stone-faced mock temple front framing the entrance: a large pediment at the roofline is lined with raking rows of block modillions, adorned with a relief of a caduceus testifying to the building's original use, and echoed underneath by a swan's-neck pediment crowning the entrance that's flanked by a pair of tablets engraved into the spandrel panels between the windows, which once bore the names of Drs. Roswell Park and Austin Flint, two pioneers of Buffalo's medical community. Also carved into the stone are monumental fluted Ionic pilaster strips interspersed between the windows, stylized Corinthian ones framing the entrance, circular medallions in the frieze as well as the architrave above the entrance, and rustication at ground level. The balance of the exterior is composed of red brick whose color contrast vis-à-vis the light-colored stone trim is a textbook trope of Colonial architecture, as are the small-paned twelve-over-twelve sash windows and the splayed lintels that crown them. More unusual for the style is the curvature of the east side elevation seen at left in this image, facing North Pearl Street. Ground was broken for the building in March 1925, with the first set of tenants setting up shop the following September in each of about sixty medical office rooms arranged into suites which were separated, according to contemporaneous accounts, by "soundproof, custom-built partitions with special office equipment" built in. The private practitioners who occupied the building for its first four decades were evicted in 1965, when the building owner leased the space to Bryant & Stratton Business Institute, a technical school for whom an increase in popularity meant it had outgrown its original campus around the corner on Main Street in what's now the Kaleida Health Foundation building. Bryant & Stratton used the lower two floors for additional classroom space until around the mid-1990s, when it moved most of its operations to its suburban campus, but continued leasing the third floor as its administrative offices even after the remainder of the building became the original home of Tapestry Charter School in 2001. Among the first such schools in Buffalo, Tapestry remained at 40 North Street until the expansion of their scope from elementary- into middle- and ultimately high-school education necessitated a larger facility. They moved in 2009 into the former Public School 36 on Days Park and are now on their own purpose-built campus in North Buffalo. As for this building, it's vacant today but protected from demolition by its listing on the locally- and nationally-listed Allentown Historic District.