File:Roosevelt Apartments - fmr Carlton Court Apartments - Buffalo, New York - 20210630.jpg

English: The Roosevelt Apartments, 921 Main Street at Carlton Street, Buffalo, New York, June 2021. The Renaissance Revival-style detailing on this seven-floor apartment building, the work of architect Ulysses G. Orr, is fine and intricate indeed. The glossy terra cotta cladding on the façade, the stylized capitals on the pilaster strips that divide the storefront-style windows on the ground floor, and the triple voussoirs over the flat-headed windows on the upper four floors are all worthy of note, but the most eye-catching architectural feature is undoubtedly the prominent cornice at the roofline, undergirded by ancone brackets decorated with acanthus leaves and with a dentil row extending underneath. Initially known as Carlton Court, this was the largest apartment building ever built in Buffalo at the time of its construction in 1914, with the local press praising it as "an attractive, centrally-located, comfortable home, fitted with every up-to-date convenience, at a moderate cost... like modern utopia", and noting its location "convenient to all streetcar lines and within walking distance of the business section" as well as the presence of a restaurant, barber shop, and telegraph office directly on the premises. It was renamed in 1932 - presumably in honor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was then New York governor and would soon be elected U.S. President - by which time it was one of an almost unbroken row of multi-story apartment buildings of similar turn-of-the-century vintage lining the east side of Main Street between downtown and Auto Row, which began roughly around the corner of North Street. (Most of those buildings were razed in the 1950s and '60s due to urban renewal; however, the Red Jacket Apartments, built in 1894 and located on the other side of Main Street at the corner of Allen Street, are another survivor of that era.) According to its Building-Structure Inventory Form filed with the New York State Division of Historic Preservation, the Roosevelt, too, was "scheduled to be torn down [in] Oct[ober 19]79 unless a developer is found". Evidently, the powers that be agreed to postpone demolition, because the building was still standing in 1984 when an investment consortium dubbed Roosevelt Renaissance Group emerged to convert it into 113 subsidized apartments for senior citizens.