File:House at 110 Greeley Street, Buffalo, New York - 20210718.jpg

English: As seen in July 2021. The house at 110 Greeley Street in Buffalo, New York is a late-period though ultimately quite typical example of what's known locally as a "Buffalo double", a type of two-family house that was a common element of the local housing stock and speaks to the forward march of construction technology of the era, and specifically the newfangled technique of "balloon framing". This new method of wall construction, using long continuous framing members ("studs") to which flooring elements are appended, opened the door for large wall elements to be essentially mass-produced in a central factory, transported to the site, and assembled like puzzle pieces, making for a much faster construction process while still maintaining decent structural quality. A side effect of this was a relative uniformity in house design, with simplified versions of popular styles of the time - Queen Anne earlier on; Colonials, Craftsman, and American Foursquare variations were also popular - appearing side by side in essentially identical iterations. The surrounding neighborhood, a part of the city now known as West Hertel, began to urbanize in the 1910s owing to two discrete factors: firstly, the spike in industrial production during America's involvement in the First World War, which saw factories spring up in the formerly undeveloped precincts of North Buffalo; secondly, the development of the New York Central's Belt Line railroad, which attracted a community of mostly Polish-American workers to fill jobs in adjacent industries, which were plentiful enough to sustain the continued growth of the area even after the war ended. The houses on the more northerly blocks of Greeley Street were relative latecomers to the neighborhood streetscape: this one was built in 1925, and its first recorded resident, New York Telephone lineman William Inglis, was living in the house as of 1926. Several more residents came and went over the next few years, but beginning in the early 1930s, the pattern of long-term tenancies and low turnover at the two units at 110 Greeley was a major anomaly in a working-class industrial neighborhood where people generally didn't live in the same place for very long. Over the next four decades, only four families called the place home: those of Michael Wysocki (1899-1966), a spring setter at a mattress factory who lived there from 1930 until '35; Duffy Silk Company employee Earle Mulville (1899-1987), who stayed from 1931 through about '39; steelworker Isadore Ciecko (1896-1953), who took over Wysocki's apartment in 1935 and lived there for the remainder of his life, with his widow Julia continuing as tenant until her own death in 1972; and finally Boleslaw "William" Graczyk (1914-1989), a laborer at the Black Rock Milling Company who moved in around 1939 and stayed until 1974 (and who also happened to be the photographer's great-great-uncle).