File:Young-Clarke House, Buffalo, New York - 20220411.jpg

English: The Young-Clarke House, 561 Franklin Street, Buffalo, New York, April 2022. Built in 1866, this magnificent brick home was cited by the Buffalo Landmark & Preservation Board as Buffalo's "best remaining example of [the] Italian Villa" style, a subtype of Italianate architecture whose principal features are a tall tower and a T- or L-shaped footprint. From the perspective of this photo, the Young-Clarke House's tower is unfortunately largely hidden behind the side gable at left, but other defining features of the Italianate style are plainly in evidence: narrow, round-arched windows; a shallow-pitched roof with widely overhanging eaves and ornate decorative brackets; stylized Classical decorative tropes (especially evident on the projecting front bay, which sports block modillions and pilaster strips between the windows). The house was built for Colonel William Clark Young (1799-1893), who worked as a civil engineer and surveyor during the relatively brief period in which he lived in Buffalo, but is better known historically as a son of pioneer settler John Young - the founder and namesake of Youngstown, Ohio - and, at the time of his death, the oldest living graduate of the military academy at West Point. Around 1872, Young moved out of town and sold the property to Charles S. Clarke (1822-1896), who as head of Clarke, Holland & Co. owned a planing mill at the corner of Court and Wilkeson Streets, at roughly the current site of Waterfront Elementary School. Clarke and his family lived at 561 Franklin until his retirement to Brooklyn in 1883. The building now houses the offices of the law firm of Dempsey & Dempsey.