File:House at 512 Moselle Street, Buffalo, New York - 20210629.jpg

English: As seen in June 2021. The house at 512 Moselle Street in Buffalo, New York is a 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 heyday of the construction of this type of residence was roughly the 1890s through the 1920s, making this house - built in 1929 - a very late-period example. Indeed, it was erected on one of the last large tracts of East Side land that remained vacant at the time (the 100 and 200 blocks of Cambridge Avenue just a short distance east, for example, weren't built out until after the Second World War). Given that the house was intended from the start as a rental property, and especially given that the house was constructed immediately preceding the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, both owners and tenants turned over with great frequency over the initial decades of the house's existence. By far the longest-tenured owners of the house were Edward Buczkowski (1910-1966) and his wife Viola née Potkowski (1910-1999), who lived there from c. 1943 until, respectively, his death and her move to the home of her son Robert in 1991. A pressman at the photolithography firm of Savage, Inc., Buczkowski was also the photographer's great-great-uncle.