File:House at 235 High Street, Buffalo, New York - 20220609.jpg

English: As seen in June 2022, the house at 235 High Street in Buffalo, New York is a good representative example of what remains of the period housing stock in the city's Fruit Belt neighborhood. It's a two-and-a-half-story wood-frame building with understated yet impressive Italianate styling: check out the frames on the upper-story windows, which take the form of paired pilaster strips crowned with bracketed entablatures the broken pediment above the front entrance, and the carvings on the narrow wooden vergeboard. The projecting bay window on the ground floor, though a later addition, harmonizes well with the original elements, sporting impressive fluted pilaster strips in between six-over-six sash windows. When it was constructed in 1881, the house filled one of the last unoccupied lots in what was then an almost fully built out section of the Fruit Belt (though nowadays vacant lots abound again thanks to the disinvestment and demolition that was prevalent in the neighborhood at the close of the 20th century). Apparently purpose-built as a two-family residence, its first tenants, each living in the place for about six or seven years, were tinsmith Rudolph Schmitt (1856-1939) and tanner William Beyer (1843-1914) and their respective families. Around 1888, the ground floor was converted to a store, namely the shoe and boot shop of Balthasar Euler (1831-1899). Meanwhile, the upper unit continued in residential use, serving as living quarters for a revolving door of working-class, mainly German-American laborers and tradespeople of various disciplines.