File:Laing-Hughes-Gastel House, Buffalo, New York - 20210511.jpg

English: The Laing-Hughes-Gastel House, 149 Shoshone Street, Buffalo, New York, May 2021. Erected in 1931, the house serves almost as a primer on the evolution of residential architecture through the early and into the mid-20th century, with a façade that - with its prim red brick, stripped-down but not minimalist aesthetic, and the sweeping asymmetrical entrance gable that cribs from the Tudor Revival (q.v. also the cut stone flourishes around the front door) - looks at first blush very much like the Minimal Traditional architecture that would come to prominence in Buffalo's far outer precincts and inner-ring suburbs over the next two decades. However, the jerkinhead atop that entrance gable is a furtive indicator of what lies behind the façade, which ultimately differs little from the vernacularized Craftsman/Prairie aesthetic of your standard early-20th century "Buffalo double". Not surprising, then, that it is indeed a two-family house masquerading in the form of a single unit. Its first owner was Richard Ross Laing (1895-1950), a Canadian-born salesman with Alcoa who lived in the house until 1933; others came and went for the remainder of the decade, but by far the longest-tenured residents of the house in its early years were Wendell H. Hughes (1902-1965), a district manager for Packard Motors and Chevrolet who as also a onetime political hopeful, mounting an unsuccessful campaign for State Assemblyman as a Republican in 1948, as well as menswear salesman Edwin F. Gastel (1896-1975). Both moved in around 1940; Hughes lived there till his death, while Gastel remained in the house at least as late as 1959 and possibly later.