File:Leman-Caster-Culver House, Buffalo, New York - 20210423.jpg

English: The Leman-Caster-Culver House, 59 Colvin Avenue, Buffalo, New York, April 2021. The boxy Prairie-style design of this 1912-vintage residence serves to reflect Frank Lloyd Wright's contemporaneous work in the Parkside East Historic District - including the Davidson House around the corner on Tillinghast Place - albeit in scaled-down and simplified form. The low-pitched hip roof sports eaves that widely overhang the stucco-faced exterior walls, thus attesting to the roots of Prairie School architecture in the Arts & Crafts Movement, while the rows of windows traversing the flat-roofed, enclosed front porch demonstrate the forward evolution of the style with their emphasis on bottom-heavy massing and horizontal orientation. The house's designer and builder was also its first resident: Canadian-born construction contractor George D. Leman (1868-1941), who lived in the house with his family for the first five years of its existence. 1918 saw the arrival of Fred Caster (1897-1956), a customshouse employee by day who moonlit as a cellist with the Caster String Quartet and would later earn a seat on the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. The Caster family stayed in the house only until 1920 - indeed, Fred himself spent most of that period overseas as a World War I soldier - whereupon it came into the hands of restaurant owner Conrad Culver (1868-1949), whose Central Cafeteria chain counted locations in the Buffalo area as well as New York City, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.