File:Hicks-Amigone House, Buffalo, New York - 20211211.jpg

English: The Hicks-Amigone House, 9 Woodley Road at Burke Drive, Buffalo, New York, December 2021. Built in 1929 to a design by Ethel Lee McBain, a notable early female architect active in the local area, the Tudor Revival styling of the Hicks-Amigone House was described in a contemporaneous Buffalo Evening News article as "combin[ing] the quaintness of old England with all the refinements that the present age of progress and luxury can give". More specifically, here we see the aesthetic's preference for half-timbered façades, corner entrances and asymmetrical gables with long, sweeping inclines. The interior aesthetic was described in the same article as one in which "color and modernism are mixed with classic dignity" and where "glass curtains in various materials and harmonious colors lend an air of quiet splendor". The house was built in 1929 as a model home for Cleveland Hill Properties: its was appointed with top-of-the-line interior designs and furnishings by local department stores such as Hens & Kelly and Adam, Meldrum & Anderson, opened to the public as a stop on that year's edition of the Buffalo Evening News' annual "Homes Beautiful Tour" (an annual event showcasing the best of the area's "showpieces of modern home building art"), and ultimately served as a beacon luring homebuyers to the tract of land that the company was marketing at that time, now known variously as Treehaven or Judges' Row. (The moniker "Cleveland Hill" now denotes a separate but nearby neighborhood, centered on the intersection of Cleveland Drive and Harlem Road in the adjacent Town of Cheektowaga.) However, 9 Woodley itself remained vacant and for sale until 1932, when it was purchased by Robert Fulton Hicks (1890-1971), a divisional manager for Chevrolet who lived in the house until 1937, when he was promoted to regional manager and moved back to his hometown of Baltimore. Much better known locally, and much longer tenured at the address, was the house's second owner: restaurateur Philip Amigone (1900-1965), proprietor of the upscale (and, in its latter days, infamous) Chez Ami nightclub on Delaware Avenue downtown. Amigone purchased the house about 1939 and continued living there until his death of cancer, which occurred while awaiting trial for "allowing [his] establishment to become disorderly" (read: operating it as a brothel).