File:Former YWCA residence, North Street, Buffalo, New York - 20220814.jpg

English: The former YWCA residence at 245 North Street, Buffalo, New York, as seen in August 2022. A work of the local architectural practice of Hudson & Hudson, this imposing four-story brick building is situated on what was previously the site of the elegant mansion of John Olmsted Adsit, and was used for many years by the local YWCA as a dormitory residence for girls, replacing an earlier and now crowded facility on Niagara Square where the Police & Fire Headquarters now stands. Initial plans, which were hatched in 1925, were for a high-rise, flat-roofed apartment block in imitation of the Harriet Judson House in Brooklyn, then regarded as the best-designed YWCA residence in the country, however these were soon rejected in favor of the smaller but more elegant edifice that was ultimately unveiled two years later, whose design was described in contemporaneous news reports as "Southern Colonial" and supposedly loosely based on that of Mount Vernon, George Washington's plantation in Virginia. Eyes are of course drawn immediately to the monumental two-story tetrastyle portico of wooden Doric pillars, but note also the splayed lintels and shutters framing the upper-story windows, the tall gambrel roof pierced with a row of dormers crowned with segmental pediments, the prominent "H-chimneys" dominating the gable ends (cribbing from the Federal style), and the cut-stone rustication surrounding the vehicle entrance at bottom right. The unusual layout of the interior includes numerous pleasant courtyards, a spacious auditorium with a separate entrance, and a dining room in the rear, which originally faced the magnificently landscaped backyard garden preserved from the Adsit house. In the later years of its ownership by the YWCA, the property's use evolved into housing for women in need of emergency shelter, psychiatric care, and the like. It's now an affordable apartment complex for senior citizens, and is a contributing property to the locally- and NRHP-listed Allentown Historic District.